Kirtsy’s win offers hope for race relations
I was stunned to read that a week after the Beijing Games, the President of Zimbabwe, Robert Mugabe, had presented his country’s swimming gold medallist, Kirsty Coventry, with a special award of US$100,000 in Harare for her effort in single-handedly raising the Zimbabwean flag three times in the Water Cube!
If it escaped your notice during Fiji TV’s TVNZ-sourced coverage of the games, Kirsty Coventry is white; one of only 30,000 in a nation of 13-million, still trying to make a living in Zimbabwe under Mugabe’s regime which has generally been very unkind to its white citizens.
Yet thousands of flag-waving mainly black Zimbabweans turned out to greet Kirsty Coventry when the plane returning her home to Zimbabwe, for a short break before she resumes university studies in the USA, landed at Harare International Airport.
Zimbabwe’s main hospital reports many new-born babies being named “Kirsty”, “Coventry” or “Kirsty Gold Medals”!
Her family still lives just outside Harare and if Mugabe calling Coventry “a daughter of the nation” and “a special jewel of Zimbabwe”, offers a ray of hope for the future of Zimbabwe then that is absolutely fantastic news that we can all only thank sport and Kirsty Coventry for.
-CULDEN KAMEA
Fiji
Posted by Wellington Chadehumbe
on September 4, 2008. Filed under Sports.
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