In the pan-Arab Games starting in Egypt tomorrow, the host country will earn 113 gold medals, 89 silver and 107 bronze for a 309 total and, naturally, a first place finish in the medals table. Of the 32 sports to be played, swimming will flood us with 42 medals, 30 will come from weightlifting, 18 from shooting, 14 track and field, 12 apiece in wrestling and fencing and 10 from karate and rowing.
These predictions are not my own; they are the Egyptian Olympic Committee’s and I bet they re wrong. We cannot win so many medals. Our finest effort was in Amman 1999: 264 medals, 107 of them gold, both Arab records that don t look like they ll be broken. And in the last Arab Games, in Algiers 2004, we were upended by the hosts 171 medals to 127, with Algeria netting 91 gold and us 81.
There is also some dispute as to the sports that will help us the most. It used to be swimming but that was when Rania Elwani was churning out 20 gold medals in two pan-Arab Games. In the All-Africa Games in Algeria this past July, swimming was the 14th sport, in order of medals won, that we depended on. From the pool in Algiers, we got just 10 medals, none of them gold. It is said we will get 18 medals from camel racing but since this sport is making its pan-Arab premiere, no-one can say for sure how we or anybody else will do.
In Algeria in the summer, we got most of our medals from weightlifting, 40, with 23 being gold.
It s not known why our organizers decided that chess will produce only seven medals. The game turned out to be a savior in Algeria; we got 13 medals from the board game, eight were gold. Algeria had more overall medals, 204 to Egypt s 197. But as is the practice in the Olympics, it s the gold tally that counts more and in that category Egypt stood on the highest podium with 74 gold to Algeria s 70. Thank you chess.
While we may dispute the medals’ haul and how they will be won, there is no question that Egypt will be atop the rest when the Games end on Nov. 25. Egypt did not take part in the second, fifth and sixth editions of the pan-Arab Games but in the seven times it has participated it has come out on top of the medals table five times. It was a cakewalk at the beginning. Egypt collected 122 medals in the first Games in Alexandria in 1953. Second was Lebanon with 34. Of the number, Egypt garnered 67 gold medals; Lebanon three.
It didn t get any better for the opposition which was consistently overrun when Egypt played, the smashing show coming in Amman. The slip in Algeria in 2004 was righted in the more difficult All-Africa Games in the same country this year.
Our virtual padlock on the pan-Arab Games cannot but be expected from a country which invented the championship, the Games being the brainchild of Egyptian Abdel-Rahman Azzam, the first secretary general of the Arab League who called for the tournament as a way of connecting Arab youth and building the future of the Arab nation. That was in 1947 but the 1948 war with Israel, after it took over Palestine, effectively halted the idea from coming to fruition until its 1953 debut in Alex when eight nations took part.
Egypt s 514 athletes will be among the 8,000 athletes from 22 countries competing in eight cities for 2,430 medals. That s a lot of competition but look at the past: Egypt heads the all-time pan-Arab medal standings with 985, 504 of them gold. The closest is Morocco with 589; 222 are gold. The figures should tell you something about the near future.
