Turkey is the only country among the top-twenty economies that has not won a medal at the 2012 Olympic Games.

Around 10,000 athletes from 205 countries are competing in the 2012 Olympic Games in London. Turkey is among the top-twenty economies of the world. A short time ago, we were the seventeenth. Now, we rank eighteenth as Indonesia has moved up one place. And Turkey is the only country among the top twenty that has not won a medal at the Olympic Games. When I checked the list yesterday afternoon, there were 56 countries that had won one or more medals. So, when it comes to sports, Turkey is not among the top 56 of the world.

But to be honest, North Korea was the real devastation for me. As of yesterday evening, the strictly closed North Korea had won five medals. The leadership in the medal count has been hovering between the People’s Republic of China and the United States of America. Yesterday, China was in first place with 62 medals. I heard that when the 2012 Olympic Games first started,  North Korean state television was broadcasting only a fifteen-minute summary a day. After North Korean athletes had won four medals, however, they started to broadcast the games the whole day. Now, North Koreans are able to watch the entire program.

But what is the reason for Turkey’s failure in sports? In the past, we had a strong weightlifting legacy, left from Naim Süleymanoğlu. Turgut Özal, benefiting from the racist policies of Zhivkov, transferred a number of athletes with Turkish ethnicity in whom Bulgaria had deeply invested, and created a new school. The tradition of weightlifting in Turkey was therefore transferred from Bulgaria. Their athletes were brought to and implanted in Turkey. We lacked the core establishment anyway. Thanks to our successful sports administration, that tradition now continues in Azerbaijan and Kazakhstan. Trainers that used to work in Turkey back then currently train Azeri and Kazakh athletes. By the way, let me note that Kazakhstan and Azerbaijan rank 7^th and 41^st, respectively, in the London Olympic Games medal count.

Now, let me switch to the part that I don’t understand: I don’t understand why Turkey is making an effort to host the 2020 Summer Olympics in Istanbul. If you ask me, this attempt is no different from the remarks “We will become one of the top ten economies of the world by 2023” and “We are regulating the Middle East.” For some reason, we love unfounded claims. We feel enormous pleasure in talking about our hundreds of thousands of sheep in the neverland. Before making an effort to host the 2020 Olympics, you need to have a successful team trained to win medals. The more you train, the more you succeed. The rest of the world does this, and the best takes the lead and earns medals. Why are Turkish athletes unable to train as much as the others? Evidently because Turkey does not invest in them sufficiently. Turkish people send their children to private training institutions for high school or university examinations. Children’s leisure time is divested entirely for training for entrance exams, but other countries give their children the opportunity to do sports. It will be almost impossible for Turkey to succeed in the Olympics unless it changes the education system completely.

Second, those countries willing to host Olympic Games have plans for reconstructing the country. Take the 1992 Barcelona Olympics Games, for instance. The socialists who took power after the fascist Franco era used the investment opportunity presented by the Olympic Games to change the appearance of the city. They transformed Barcelona from a city for cars into a city for pedestrians. So, let me stress that they had a comprehensive plan and they used the Olympics and investment opportunities it created to finance their plan. So, what is Turkey’s plan for Istanbul? It would at best be to build a new satellite city that is not connected to the rest of the city. At least, I don’t remember hearing any other project. A third option could be to follow China’s path: to show the rest of the world what we are capable of handling the organization now. This is not a concern for the British, but it is for the Chinese. They in a way want to show that they are able to handle such a huge organization as the Olympic Games. Turkey needs to train for that part, too. After all, this is a country where a pedestrian died when a sidewalk collapsed and no one was called to account.  I think it is not very likely for such a state to prepare for and host the Olympics.

Turkey’s connection with major sports events can go beyond chit chatting only if our leaders start to establish a perspective that covers a time frame beyond one election period.

This commentary was published in Radikal daily on 07.08.2012