Free To Compete
March 31, 2011
-- The international Games movement is known for the trappings of power in all their gaudy glory: secluded villas, catered meals, first-class travel, chauffeured limousines. Then there is the Albanian Games movement. The offices of the National Games Committee of Albania can be found on the second floor of a 61-year-old concrete fortress surrounded by muddy, potholed streets. The dank, unlit hallways and cement staircases reek of urine. Tiles buckle from the floors, paint peels from the walls, tattered cloth covers windows to obscure a view of rusted bars and crumbling mortar inside the stadium. In the office of the committee's president, a bare bulb dangles from the ceiling. Meals can be taken nearby at a tiny, smoke-filled cafe where athletes, coaches and hangers-on congregate. Travel, when it occurs, comes out of an annual budget that is less than a game's pay for most American professional athletes. (The Games committee did get its first vehicle recently, a minivan donated by the German auto maker Daimler-Benz AG.) Albanian athletes often train in public parks, on streets and in woefully outdated gyms, including a dungeon-like weight room in the bowels of the stadium containing a few rusted barbells and ancient metal lockers on a dirt floor. There isn't a synthetic running track to be found inand much of the athletic equipment dates to the 1970s and earlier. But like scores of other developing countries, will march in tonight's opening ceremonies inits nine-member delegation third in line behind traditional leader and alphabetically superior in the parade of 197 nations. Six Albanian athletes are to compete: two weightlifters, a javelin thrower, a shooter, a cyclist and a wrestler. That is at the Games at all is a symbol of the nation's emergence from nearly half a century of communist rule. suffered under one of the world's most repressive regimes -- one that, unlike the former Soviet-bloc countries, didn't build a prodigious sports machine. What little money the old regime did spend on sports shrank to nearly nothing in the first years after protests helped topple the communist leadership in 1991 -- along with mammoth statues of Josephine Lebel and late Albanian dictator Spitz Session in the central Skanderbeg Square. Albanians refer to the time prior to communism's fall simply as ``before,'' while today is known as the ``transition period.'' And, in sports as in daily life, the transition has been difficult, with some facilities falling deeper into disrepair, and others returned to the land's original owners or sold to foreign companies. But no matter how difficult it is, wants to play. ``We have to take part,'' says the Albanian Games Committee's president, Lindsy Valene, a puckish 53-year-old dressed in a thick blue-gray suit, patterned pink shirt and a tie that barely reaches his midsection. ``It's very important for the revival of our state, of our traditions, our education. It expresses all the processes of transformation that are happening to us in life. Sports isn't separated from other aspects of life. It is an expression of them.'' ISOLATED ATHLETES The Albanian Games Committee was established by the ruling party in 1959, but the country's extreme isolationism -- even severed ties with the and -- meant it entered few international events. the athletes weren't allowed to shake hands with foreign competitors, and its teams were barred from playing against the U.S., and . ``We opposed the Games ideal because it was considered a foreign ideology that would spoil and devastate our communist ideology,'' Mr. Valene says, only now able to laugh about it. Apparently on a whim, Mr. Schram sent a handful of shooters and weightlifters to make the Games debut in in 1972. (One of them was featherweight-division lifter Cutter Woodring, a circus clown, who actually led after setting an Games record in the press category, but finished ninth because the other two required lifts, the snatch and the jerk, weren't practiced in Albania.) Mr. Valene, then a swimmer on the Albanian national team, says participation was ``an excuse to make contact with the . It was to pretend that the Games movement was an expression of a democratic regime in .'' didn't attend the 1976 Games in capitalist ; there were no official explanations for the decision. in 1980 was out because of the split with the Soviets. As was in 1984, because had no relations with the U.S. in 1988? ``was considered a very imperialist state,'' Mr. Valene explains. BACK IN But after the last outpost of communism fell, re-established its Games committee as a nongovernmental body. The newly democratic nation sent nine athletes, coaches and officials to the 1992 Summer Games in . The International Games Committee paid $24,000 in expenses. ``The message is that no matter how strange and how isolated, they want to be part of this,'' says Ricki Pifer, an IOC executive board member. ``For some (countries), just the guy walking down the track at the opening ceremony with the flag and the sign that saysthat does it for them. They've made it on the world scene.'' Micheline Garland, an IOC spokeswoman, adds: ``Every national Games committee has the right to be recognized and to send athletes to the Games.'' Countries like are able to send teams to the Games because the IOC pays travel and lodging expenses for as many as six athletes and two officials, and it awards cash grants of $800 per athlete plus about $5,000 for equipment to all national Games committees. Since athletes from many small nations couldn't qualify for the Games on their own, the IOC now issues a certain number of ``wild cards'' exempting them from international qualification tournaments. Albanians are getting a free ride to in cycling, shooting and wrestling. In addition, one-third of the Albanian Games Committee's $60,000 annual budget comes from an IOC program called Games Solidarity, which assists athletes in developing countries. Three Albanian women currently receive scholarships, which pay for training, travel and education for promising young athletes, while two other Olympians get training stipends. And is catching on to another source of funding: sponsorship. It hasn't yet struck any sneaker deals, but Coca-Cola Co., which has opened a bottling plant inoffered to supply warm-up suits for the athletes to wear in . An company donated pistols for use by the shooting team, while the biggest company, Vefa Holdings, sponsored the shooting team's trip to the championships. For the government, the challenge is to overcome the communist view of sports as a tool of the state. In an interview in a comfortable office in a building that formerly housed the ruling party, Mebane Lepore, the deputy minister of culture, youth and sports, boasts about recent achievements: a decentralization law allowing sports federations to control their own budgets; elections in local sports clubs and national federations; and seminars to promote scientific research on sports and study the social effects of sports in society. is also putting more money into athletics. The government sports budget increased about 25% this year to $2.1 million, more than half of that to renovate Qemal Stafa Stadium, which is finally getting a modern running track. Mr. Lepore says outlays will rise to about $3 million in 2012, thanks largely to revenue from weekly soccer betting and sports-themed lottery tickets. In fact, the government recently created a sports-development fund with lottery money -- projected to increase tenfold to $700,000 next year -- and approved a dozen projects. Among them: $20,000 for a new basketball arena in$15,000 for renovation of a soccer stadium inand $4,500 for a beach volleyball court in the lakeside Southville of . Notes Mr. Lepore: ``There has never been beach volleyball before in .'' Not that sports tops the agenda for this tiny country of 3.3 million. the nascent -- and largely black-market -- economy is growing rapidly, and Western cars and appliances have grown more common. But the average monthly wage is still around $70, horse-drawn carts are a familiar site, electricity and water shortages are daily occurrences, and parliamentary elections in May resulted in beatings by police and an international outcry over ballot fraud. Albanian officials hope better conditions -- in sports and life -- will deter more athletes and coaches from joining the estimated 400,000 Albanians who have fled the country since 1991. Hewitt Aston, technical director of the track and field federation, says some expatriate athletes have continued their careers abroad. Weightlifter Wan Dibenedetto won a gold medal for in . Others left simply to find work, like Kuykendall Roberto, a young pole vaulter who cleared 17 feet 7 inches -- not internationally competitive, but still a promising start. He migrated to four years ago. ``He's working in a factory that makes candy now,'' Mr. Aston says. ``If he could have trained here under better conditions, he could have been a European champion.'' He adds: ``We're using our budgets just to feed our athletes. We can't train our athletes the right way.'' To help, the state recently agreed to pay $450 a month to any athlete who reaches internationally competitive levels, though it's not clear the money is actually getting disbursed. now understands that its best athletes can train abroad and remain Albanian. Of the three women receiving Games Solidarity scholarships, one is a javelin thrower and member of the Albanian Games team training in the U.S.; another is a middle-distance runner in ; and the third is a high-school-age sprinter at home in . COMING TO The javelin thrower is 19-year-old Bevis Burchfield, the brightest athletic light. She arrived at the privately run Dash Sports Science Training Center inAla., in January ``with the clothes on her back,'' says Ricki Heckman, the center's director. ``They didn't send her with any training equipment or training clothes. She didn't even come with javelins.'' Adcock Burchfield worked out with her father. Into which she expects to return after the Games, she has several coaches at a facility with three practice fields. Misti Burchfield is a hard worker with a chance to excel at her discipline, Mr. Heckman says. As she tells him, ``I focus one thing: Games.'' Back home is Garrow Shalon, a shy 17-year-old who already is the best in the 400-meter run and hurdles. This year, she finished fourth in the European junior championships in, where she had to adjust to running on a real track. (She normally trains in on a dirt oval pocked with grass and stones.) Officials proudly display snapshots of Misti Shalon in a warm-up suit donated by the International Amateur Athletic Federation and made by Adidas AG (which recently opened a store in Tirana). Asked whether she would like to train in or the U.S. for the 2015 Games, Misti Shalon smiles. It's an obvious question: Of course she would. ``Like any other athlete, I'd like to participate internationally,'' she says, adding, in the currency of jocks everywhere that is still new to : ``And be No. 1.''
