It Takes a Little Teamwork

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Abdou Alassane Dji Bo's Olympic debut lasted just 1 min. 33 sec., but he didn't come out feeling like a loser. The 25-year-old judoist, the first from Niger ever to compete at the Games, crashed out in the first round of the 66-kg weight class, in a bout with Slovakia's Jozef Krnac that resembled a very fast two-man game of Twister. "Of course in my heart, it hurt to lose," Alassane says. But the point of this trip for Alassane — and for Olympic Solidarity (OS), the scholarship program that has given him more than $20,000 for training and travel over the past 18 months — was to get a masterclass in judo. Krnac went on to win the silver. "I've seen that there's a much higher level," Alassane says.

The OS program is designed to help him, and 584 other Athens Olympians, reach that level. During the past two years, the International Olympic Committee (I.O.C.) has plowed $13.7 million into athlete scholarships, and another $100 million into training centers, regional competitions and sports development. Without the money that OS invested in him, Alassane would never have left Niger to train, got a world-class coach or won a bronze medal at the African championships in May, the feat that qualified him for Athens. OS "is indispensable," says Hassene Ikhlef, who coaches Alassane and 19 other scholarship holders at the International Center for African Judo (CIJA) in Rabat, Morocco. Without the funding, nations like Niger "would be very sparsely represented. These countries don't have the means to train properly, to travel, to compete."

OS was born along with the newly independent nations of the developing world in the 1960s and 1970s. "There were suddenly all these new Olympic committees coming into being that wanted to send athletes to the Games," says James Macleod, the I.O.C. project manager who oversees the scholarships. But many of the countries didn't have the sports infrastructure or financial resources to develop and field teams for the Games, much less contend for medals. "The Olympic Games wouldn't be the Olympic Games with just the big countries," says Macleod. "We're trying to give the smaller ones the means and the methods to send athletes to compete in the Games with dignity."