For Obama, a Scouting Report on Athletic Heads of State
Doug Mills/The New York Times
Barack Obama helped his high school basketball team win a state championship.
By CHRISTOPHER CLAREY
Published: November 16, 2008
Barack Obama still moves with the ease of an athlete and has the left-handed jump shot to prove it, along with a state high school basketball championship to his credit, as a senior at Punahou School in Hawaii in 1979.
The stars were Darryl Gabriel, Dan Hale and John Kamana, all of whom were multisport threats who went on to play for Division I programs. Obama, who then went by the first name of Barry, came off the bench. But there can be no debate about who is now the star of that Punahou team.
As President-elect Obama prepares to take his rhetorical and organizational gifts and crossover dribble into the highest office in his land, he may be interested to know that other current heads of state have strong sporting résumés of their own.
A world tour of his new peer group:
Europe
Obama could and should schedule a jog with President Nicolas Sarkozy of France, for whom sports, it must be said, looks more like a duty than a pleasure. Obama could also steal a page from President Bush’s playbook, and arrange to go cycling with Anders Fogh Rasmussen, the prime minister of Denmark. The president and the prime minister road mountain bikes together at Bush’s Texas ranch earlier this year, but the prime minister is just as comfortable on paved roads. Last summer, at the invitation of the former Danish cyclist Bjarne Riis, Rasmussen took on part of the Tour de France’s brutal mountain stage at Alpe d’Huez after the professional riders had finished.
It is probably best, however, that Obama avoid getting too sporty with Russia’s prime minister, Vladimir V. Putin, a strongman in both senses of the term. Putin is a judo expert and former champion of his home city, St. Petersburg, and he does not mind removing his shirt in public to remind everyone that he is still in fighting shape.
A boat trip with King Juan Carlos of Spain, an Olympic sailor in 1972, sounds more relaxing. So does a visit to Monaco. Prince Albert, a five-time Olympian in bobsledding, is always up for some exercise to fight off cabin fever in his postage-stamp principality. And like Obama, Prince Albert attended college in the northeast of the United States (he went to Amherst; Obama to Columbia).
But if Obama is looking for a true sporting home away from home in the Old World, he would be best advised to schedule summit meetings in Sweden and Montenegro. Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt of Sweden and Prime Minister Milo Djukanovic of Montenegro were accomplished basketball players when they were younger and both are closer to their youth than the 47-year-old president-elect of the United States. Djukanovic is a year younger (and several centimeters taller). Reinfeldt is younger still at 43.
South America
Argentina is the men’s basketball powerhouse in this part of the world, but its president, Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, restricts her court time to photo opportunities with national icons like Manu Ginóbili. South America’s most sports-minded leader resides farther north and inland in Bolivia, where President Evo Morales is a much more rabid supporter of soccer than he is of United States influence in his region. But Morales is not only a soccer fan who successfully fought to overturn FIFA’s decision to ban official matches at high-altitude sites like the Bolivian capital, La Paz. Morales still plays regularly at 47 and played a game for the Bolivian second-division club Litoral earlier this year wearing the playmaker’s traditional No. 10 jersey.
North America
With the former star baseball pitcher Fidel Castro no longer officially in power in Cuba, there is no real athletic competition for Obama in his own region. But Stephen Harper certainly knows his ice hockey — a useful passion for a Canadian prime minister. Harper is a longtime supporter of the Toronto Maple Leafs and has an extensive personal library of books on the sport, a library that should eventually grow by at least one more volume when Harper finishes the long-delayed tome he is writing on the early history of Canadian hockey.
Africa
The former A.C. Milan soccer star George Weah lost a run-off presidential election in Liberia in 2005. But there is still sporting talent among Africa’s leadership, including the new Kenyan prime minister, Raila Odinga, who is from same Luo tribe as Obama’s father and who played some club soccer himself, albeit far from Serie A, as a midfielder for Luo Union in Kenya.
But the 63-year-old Odinga, with a fragile political peace to keep, is not covering much ground anymore. If Obama is looking for his kind of workout, he had best head to Tanzania, where the president, Jakaya Kikwete, was also a scholastic basketball player of some repute. The trouble is, Obama has some big shoes to fill if he wants to make an impression. President Bush made the journey to Dar es Salaam in February, presenting Kikwete with a pair of size 23 basketball sneakers from the N.B.A. star Shaquille O’Neal. Kikwete then returned the visit by coming to Washington in August and attending a W.N.B.A. game.
Asia
The only Olympian leading a country here is Taro Aso, the new prime minister of Japan, who represented his nation in skeet shooting at the 1976 Games in Montreal. But there is no shortage of other well-connected sportsmen (sportswomen are hard to find). Tayyip Erdogan, the prime minister of Turkey, played semiprofessional soccer for nearly 20 years.
As for royalty, King Bhumibol Adulyadej of Thailand, the world’s longest-serving head of state, won a gold medal in dinghy sailing in a precursor to the Southeast Asian Games in 1967. And Sheik Mohammed bin Rashid al-Maktoum, the ruler of Dubai in the United Arab Emirates, has owned horses who won most of the biggest prizes in horse racing, including the Prix de l’Arc de Triomphe in Paris and the Preakness Stakes. He also created and helped bankroll the Dubai World Cup, the world’s richest series of races.
China’s leaders, some of whom Obama will presumably be meeting, have also shown plenty of interest in using sports as a national marketing tool (see the grandiose Beijing Olympics in August). But there also seems to be some genuine interest in sports behind the nation building.
President Hu Jintao plays table tennis well enough to hold his own in front of the cameras against the younger set, which presumably has no interest in making the most powerful man in China look bad.
China’s premier, Wen Jiabao, likes basketball and was photographed in action earlier this year during a visit to China’s national team practice. Wen, then 65, was wearing street clothes in the photograph but he was definitely airborne as he shot with — Obama fans take note — his left hand.
Oceania
With his Hawaiian roots, Obama should have little trouble relating to this balmy, palm-fronded part of the world. The athlete-politician to meet resides on an island that is much smaller than Oahu, where Obama went to high school. Marcus Stephen is the president of Nauru, a coral blip in the midst of the vast Pacific with a population of less than 14,000 and with only 21 square kilometers of real estate. It is the smallest independent republic in the world.
“There are not many countries you can bicycle around before breakfast,” wrote the BBC correspondent Nick Squires, who visited there earlier this year.
Stephen, who took office last year, became a big fish in this puddle by winning five gold medals at the Commonwealth Games and a silver at the 1999 world championships as a weight lifter. He was also an Olympian. But the heaviest lifting may be yet to come. As Stephen pointed out in an address to the United Nations General Assembly in New York in September, “Global warming is predicted conservatively to raise sea level by one meter in this century.”
“This will flood our only habitable land,” he said. “Our people will literally be trapped between the rising sea and an ancient, uninhabitable coral field.”
And Obama thought he had problems.