It Takes a Little Teamwork

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The idea is to spot talent early. Mozambican track star Maria Mutola got a scholarship in 1991, at age 18, which funded her move to the U.S. to train. "They supported me from day one, and it inspired me," she says. "They gave me the opportunity to focus on my athletic career." Mutola took a little while to deliver Olympic returns on the investment. In 1996, she won a bronze in the 800 m, her first Olympic medal — and Mozambique's. Four years later, she won the gold, which she's in Athens to defend. Mutola has started her own foundation for promising athletes.

Such examples of OS success buoy Alassane and other scholarship holders who once couldn't even imagine getting to the Games. As a kid, he lived near a local judo club in the Niger capital, Niamey, and fell in love with the sport because "it was a chance to knock everybody flat." He flattened enough opponents to become national champion at 13. But before he got his OS scholarship, he could barely scrape together the funds to compete outside Niger. Alassane grew up as one of six children in what, for Niger, is a middle-class family, with an income of a couple hundred dollars a month. But he left school after ninth grade, and neither his family nor his country had the money to pay for a world-class athlete's training and travel, which costs at least $10,000 a year — 50 times the per capita income in Niger. "About the most we could afford was to cross the border to Burkina Faso," says Alassane. There was no system in place to cultivate his talent. "You could show up for training or not, and nobody really cared," he says. "The coaches did the same thing."

Chewed out by his father — who was an amateur judoist in his student days — whenever he got lazy, Alassane fought on. After placing third at two regional meets in late 2002 and winning a place at the CIJA in Morocco, OS stepped forward to cover his costs. "It was an enormous boost," he says. After about a year of coaching and a new, more rigorous training regimen — two hours of speed and endurance training in the mornings, two hours of combat and sparring in the afternoons — he got bronze at this year's African championships in Tunisia, and qualified for Athens.

Before Athens, Alassane had, like so many others, entertained fantasies of Olympic glory. A month before the Games, while training near Paris, he told TIME: "I have worked hard, really hard. Everybody goes for a medal. I say, 'Why not me?'" OS also said, "Why not?" But in reality, he was not ready — this time. His big prize, and that of most other OS athletes in Athens, was the exposure, the opportunity to compete, the taste of the experience that has whetted his appetite for more.

The day after his loss, Alassane was back at the judo venue, watching and learning lessons from every match, philosophical and a little humbler. "The competition is so advanced in both tactics and technique," he marveled. "I'm truly content, but I need to work a little harder." Macleod says "medals are not the point of Solidarity." Nor will they be the only measure of Alassane's — or any other athlete's — growth. Even if he never strikes Olympic gold, Alassane "has discovered the world and enriched himself as a person. That," says his coach, Ikhlef, "is the success story."