Nebraska and Bangladesh

The two have an unfortunate sports history in common

Photo by 🄰llauddin 🄼iajee on Unsplash

Bangladesh has a lot going for it right now. After a rough war for independence and major genocide 50 years ago, the country today is on the way up. Economic growth has averaged around five percent since the 1990s. The country’s government, while far from perfect, is a democracy. Bangladesh has positioned itself as one of the world’s factories, as much of the low-valued manufacturing traditionally associated with China has moved on. Far from being the impoverished nation of famine that inspired aid appeals around the world a half century ago, the Bangladesh of today is a middle-income country that is trending strongly in the right direction.

In one area, however, Bangladesh has remained a laggard: Olympic sports. To date, Bangladesh is the largest country by population that has never won an Olympic medal. That’s bad enough, but the reality is far worse than that. To date, Bangladesh has only had two people even qualify for the Olympics. Let alone win anything, there is hardly anyone in Bangladesh who can compete. This seems impossible. Bangladesh has 170 million people. It’s the eighth largest country in the world by population, sandwiched in between Russia and Brazil. Both those countries won multiple gold medals at the Tokyo Olympics alone.

But hasn’t Bangladesh competed in more than two Olympics? How could they only have two qualifying athletes? Through the 1990s and 2000s, Bangladesh participated in the Olympics through “invited spots”. Many countries are given invitations to send several athletes in a few popular sports. These are for athletes who didn’t qualify based on merit, but the spots are given in the spirit of the goodwill that is an Olympics hallmark. Fair enough. Through these invitations, Bangladesh has had at least four participants in each Olympics since the 1988 games in Seoul. Of course, such a system can produce rampant nepotism, as when Somalia used one such slot to send a non-athlete to an international track competition last year. It wasn’t until the 2016 games that Siddikur Rahman, a golfer, narrowly qualified for the Olympics. To make it, a golfer had to be in the top 60 of the Olympic rankings. At number 56, Rahman just squeaked in. He finished in the 58th. Then, archer Ruman Shana qualified for the 2020 Olympics in Tokyo. He won his first match, making it to the round of 32, before losing to Crispin Duenas from Canada.

It is astonishing to me that Bangladesh could be so bad at the Olympics. It’s a huge country! 170 million people. On the other end of the spectrum lies so-small-this-can’t-actually-be-a-country San Marino, population 30,000, with three Olympic medals. There are a few other nations that have fared similarly poorly at the Olympics, notably the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), which is the 16th most populated country. There’s a notable difference between Bangladesh and the DRC, however. While Bangladesh is a middle-income country, the DRC is one of the world’s poorest, with a GDP per capita less than a fifth as large.

Also, while poverty clearly hinders the development of athletes, it isn’t always a binding constraint. Kenya is a poor country, significantly poorer than Bangladesh, and has less than half the population. Yet they have an impressive 113 Olympic medals in their war chest. Some might be quick to point out that almost all of those 113 medals are in running. To which I have to rejoinders. First, so what? Running in a lot of ways is the ultimate sporting event. Everyone does it! It’s great that the Netherlands can rack up 133 medals in speed skating, but to do so means serious expenditure on infrastructure. A lot of countries don’t have the money to keep large indoor ice rinks working around the year. Running, on the other hand, is athleticism distilled to its basic roots. No equipment or arenas needed. Just individuals pursuing excellence. Second, seven of those 113 medals are in boxing, so it isn’t fair to say Kenya has only one sport. The point being, poverty doesn’t preclude a country from Olympic success.

And again, what is astonishing isn’t that Bangladesh doesn’t have a medal, it’s that until the 2016 games, they had never even had someone qualify! The one point I’ll concede is that the most popular sport in Bangladesh is cricket, which is not part of the Olympics. Even if it were, however, Bangladesh would be unlikely to compete for a medal. Their program has made strides in recent years, but they still lag behind traditional powerhouses like Australia, India, or England.

Something needs to be done. Going forward, I suggest a few strategies. First, find athletic members of the Bangladeshi diaspora. It isn’t the most honest way to do it, but there have to be some very athletic individuals around the world who qualify for Bangladeshi citizenship. Go the route of Saudi Arabia. One of Saudi Arabia’s first female athletes had never even lived in the country, but qualified for citizenship through a parent. Find those individuals and get them to compete on the flag of Bangladesh. Second, pick a relatively obscure sport and devote money to it. How did little San Marino win their first medal? By taking third place in women’s trap shooting. I’m not even sure what that is. Find a sport without a lot of competition, and spend a decade developing a program. You just need one diamond in the rough to get a medal.

Finally, Bangladesh should take solace in the University of Nebraska football team. Nebraska was a college football powerhouse. 46 conference titles. 5 national titles. 3 Heisman trophy winners. The latest national title was in 1997. Since, then, to say the wheels came off and the car went into the ditch would be a woeful understatement. Nebraska football over the last 25 years is more like a car driving off a bridge, sinking to the bottom of the ocean, and then bursting into flame.

Currently, Nebraska has not qualified for a bowl game for seven straight seasons. That might not sound like a lot, but remember: qualifying for a college bowl game isn’t that hard. Finish at .500 is all it takes. The fact that there isn’t that one school with a 20-year drought shows that making a bowl game isn’t much of an accomplishment. In fact, Nebraska now has the longest bowl drought of any team in the Power 5 conferences and the third-longest drought in all of college football.

Nebraska’s streak, like Bangladesh’s Olympic record, seems impossible. How could perennial cellar dwellers like Illinois, Vanderbilt, and Washington State not be worse? How can a blue-blood program, a program so popular that when the football stadium fills it’s large enough to be the third-largest city in the entire state, become one of the worst teams in all of college football? Now, firing now one but two coaches after 9+ win seasons probably wasn’t smart, but still. Nebraska falling from championship contender to middling program is one thing. Zenith to nadir is another.

If a program like Nebraska can fall so hard to rock bottom, then Bangladesh can rise above it. Pick a sport, find some talented citizens, and put money into a program. Pluck that one individual who will get a bronze in fencing, judo, or even break dancing (for real). Become the Netherlands of table tennis. Something. Until they do, Bangladesh will hold the ignoble title of the largest country without an Olympic medal.