“The most important thing in the Olympic Games is not winning but taking part; the essential thing in life is not conquering but fighting well” – Baron Pierre de Coubertin, International Olympic Committee founder and father of the modern Games.

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Poolside or on the track, sprinters always stress the importance of exploding from the starting blocks on the B of the starting pistol’s BANG! In the first qualifying heat of the men’s 100m freestyle at Sydney 2000, two of the three nervous participants bucked the trend, choosing instead to go on the “S” of the starter’s “get set”.

With five lanes of the vast Olympic swimming pool unoccupied, Niger’s Karim Bare and Tajikistan’s Farkhod Oripov didn’t just jump the gun, they vaulted it Sergey Bubka- style, such was their overeagerness to immerse their skin-hugging polyurethane bodysuits in the drink.

Crouched forlornly on the starting block of lane five wearing nothing more aerodynamic than a pair of blue swimming trunks with white go-faster stripes, Equatorial Guinea’s Eric Moussambani looked quizzically across to the starter as if to say: “What now?” An already surreal state of affairs had got weirder, but only the most schmaltzy Hollywood screenwriter could have predicted what would happen next.

Twelve months previously, Moussambani had been unable to swim and had yet to set foot outside his native country, the tiny oil-rich nation of Equatorial Guinea. Repressively governed then and now by Africa’s longest-serving ruler, the despotic president Teodoro Obiang, the per capita wealth of Equatorial Guinea exceeds that of the UK, but the majority of its 700,000 citizens are impoverished and forced to get by on less than one dollar a day.

Rubbing shoulders with North Korea, Burma and Somalia on the list of the planet’s most despotic hell-holes, Equatorial Guinea under Obiang was recently described by the Observer’s Ian Birrell as “a ruthless one-party state where elections are stolen, opponents jailed and state coffers looted, control of daily life is all-pervasive and the government is accused of gross human rights abuses, including torture and extra-judicial killings.” It was from this hostile environment that Moussambani had emerged to participate at Sydney 2000, having never even seen, let alone dipped a toe in, an Olympic-sized 50metre pool.

Five days before the race that would make him a household name, Moussambani arrived in Sydney with £50 spending money and enjoyed the honour of carrying the Equatorial Guinea flag in the opening ceremony of the Games. Despite the significant handicap of having been unable to swim eight months previously, he had gained entry to the Olympics via a wild-card scheme, since significantly scaled back, that was established to give athletes from developing countries the opportunity to compete. It was through the same scheme that Eddie “The Eagle” Edwards, then a plasterer, had been allowed to compete in the ski jump at the 1988 Calgary Winter Olympics.

His entry secured, Moussambani set about teaching himself to swim in the pool of a hotel in his home town of Malabo. Having mastered the basics and training alone without a coach, he had nobody to help him clock his efforts in a 20m pool that wasn’t even roped into lanes. To make matters worse, in the buildup to the Games, Moussambani had been mistakenly informed that he would be swimming only 50m and had trained accordingly. Upon his arrival in Sydney he was understandably alarmed to discover the discipline in which he was entered was twice that distance, a comparative test of endurance he had never even attempted.

Eric Moussambani of Equatorial Guinea concentrates before his 100m freestyle heat. Photograph: Greg Wood/EPA

After Moussambani’s rivals Bare and Oripov had false-started, confusion reigned in the Sydney International Aquatic Centre. The pair swam back to their blocks and dragged themselves from the pool, only to be disqualified for their overzealousness. With only one competitor left, it was presumed the heat would be abandoned and Moussambani would proceed to the next round, but after conferring, the Olympic authorities announced he would have to compete alone against the clock, in front of 17,000 spectators, in a bid to make the qualifying time of 1min 10sec (the world record at the time was 48.18sec). For the second time that morning, the starter fired his pistol and, for the first time in his 22-year existence, Moussambani dived off a starting block into a 50m pool.

Alone in such a vast expanse of water, Moussambani made for a peculiar sight, but set off at a fair old clip. However, when it became quickly apparent that he wasn’t much of a swimmer, laughter became audible above the half-hearted cheers of the bemused crowd. Moussambani had looked the part, buff and ripped as he sliced the water with a dive that looked technically adequate to the untrained eye, but as he approached the halfway turn in 40.97sec, it was painfully apparent that he was hopelessly and quite literally out of his depth.

“This guy doesn’t look like he’s going to make it,” said Adrian Moorhouse, co-commentating for the BBC. “I am convinced this guy is going to have to get hold of the lane rope in a moment,” he continued, as Moussambani inched his way down the pool, veering diagonally across his lane as he flailed in desperation. But with 30 metres to go and the raucous din of the good-natured, highly amused but supportive Australian crowd growing in volume as they roared their encouragement for the hapless underdog, the flailing object of their affection steeled himself for one final big push.

“He’s going to make it, this is the Olympics, he’s got 17,000 people shouting for him,” enthused Moorhouse, easing growing concern that the waywardly thrashing Moussambani, now practically swimming on the spot, might actually drown. And make it he did, eventually “winning” heat one of the 100m freestyle in a time of 1min 52.72sec, the slowest time in Olympic history, albeit a personal best that was a mite under 43 seconds outside the qualifying time. Indeed, so slow was Moussambani that his time for 100m was seven seconds longer than it had taken the Australian swimmer Ian Thorpe to swim exactly twice the distance in the same pool the previous day.

The Dutch swimmer Pieter van den Hoogenband won the final of Moussambani’s event in 48.30sec, setting a new world record in the semi-final.

“The first 50 metres were OK, but in the second 50 metres I got a bit worried and thought I wasn’t going to make it,” said a dripping, visibly shattered, but elated Moussambani after he had dragged himself out of the pool. “Then something happened. I think it was all the people getting behind me. I was really, really proud. It’s still a great feeling for me and I loved when everyone applauded me at the end. I felt like I had won a medal or something.”

If Moussambani had won a medal, it would have been a first for Equatorial Guinea and made him a national hero, but so epic and endearing was the nature of his glorious failure to earn him a place anywhere near the podium that he quickly found himself basking in the kind of global acclaim normally reserved for truly great Olympic stars of track and field.

Such was the level of media interest in his heroic effort that Olympic officials were forced to provide him with a translator and personal assistant to help cope with more than 100 interview requests from TV, newspapers and magazines. Labelling Moussambani “Eric The Eel”, the opportunists at the Speedo marketing department kitted him out with one of their Fastskin bodysuits and promised an “ongoing commitment” to the swimmer that resulted in him being ferried around Europe doing promotional work over the next 12 months.

Back at the Olympic village, Moussambani was hailed as the very embodiment of the Games spirit and his every excursion was soundtracked by spontaneous applause. A giant banner was draped outside the lodgings of the Equatorial Guinea team declaring “Eric the swimmer lives here”, a German TV crew took him on a tour of Sydney Harbour and his hero, the Australian swimmer Michael Klim, sought him out to shake his hand.

“This is what the Olympics is all about,” said Klim’s team-mate Thorpe, who won three golds and two silvers in the pool at his hometown Games. Not everyone concurred with Thorpe, not least in Equatorial Guinea, where Moussambani’s high-profile failure was considered by those in high places to be a source of much national embarrassment.

The International Olympic Committee’s president, Jacques Rogge, also disagreed with Thorpe’s assessment that heroism of the hapless was what the Games were all about, telling the Guardian about his plans to stop handing out wild cards to countries that would otherwise be unable to send competitors on the grounds that “we want to avoid what happened in the swimming in Sydney; the public loved it, but I did not like it.”

Considering his diktat that the Olympic Games are for the world and “all nations must be admitted to them”, it’s difficult to imagine that Rogge’s predecessor Baron de Coubertin would have shared such a snooty elitist view.

What happened next

Once the clocked ticked down on Moussambani’s 15 minutes of fame, the endorsements dried up and media interest in the Olympic darling inevitably dwindled, the swimmer set about preparing for the next Games in Athens, despite the best attempts of his government and national Olympic body to thwart his progress at every turn. Relentless training helped him slash his personal best from 1min 57.2sec to under 57 seconds, but an offer of a scholarship to a university in Wisconsin was withdrawn when bureaucrats in Equatorial Guinea either couldn’t, or wouldn’t, submit the relevant paperwork.

Shortly before the 2004 Olympics, media interest in Moussambani flickered briefly when it emerged that his efforts to compete in Athens appeared doomed to failure. “I have been training very hard for three years and my goal was wanting to go to Athens and to show people I can do better,” explained the impoverished engineering student, having travelled from his adopted home of Valencia just a couple of days before the Equatorial Guinea team were due to set off for Athens. “The [Speedo] contract is finished now. I don’t have any more sponsors. I have been training very hard but nobody has been helping me. I have a plan to go to Athens but if I can’t go, there is not enough money to continue.” A suspiciously convenient blunder in Malabo government HQ prevented Moussambani from showing the world how much he’d improved, when the passport photograph required for his accreditation was mislaid.

How the Guardian reported it: 20 September 2000