KENT, England — A few miles from the songs and the sounds and the artificial rain at the Olympic Stadium on Friday, Jacqueline Esimaje-Heath watched the beginning of the London Games on television and found it hard not to think about endings — about how the end of her own Olympic ambitions led to the unlikely beginning for the athlete carrying the United States flag.

Esimaje-Heath and Mariel Zagunis, the American flag bearer, have never had a meal together. They have never talked about the intricacies of the saber, their shared discipline in fencing, or reminisced about the strains of competing at the highest level. They have not even laughed casually about the strange sequence of events that links them.

They are strangers, and yet their lives are intertwined: Zagunis almost surely would not have been the face of United States sports Friday night if not for Esimaje-Heath, a Nigerian real estate executive with a husband and a son and a bizarre (if not brutal) story about how her own country took the Olympics away from her.

Early Friday, as colleagues in her office here chatted amiably about the impending opening ceremony, Esimaje-Heath never winced as she recalled “the madness” of it all. It began in March 2004, she said, when she completed an event in Italy and confirmed that her ranking was high enough to qualify her for that summer’s Athens Olympics. It was euphoric, she said, as she had only taken up fencing in her 20s. Then 33, she believed she had somehow found her way to a pinnacle; she and her friends celebrated, eating and drinking into the night. She almost missed her flight the next morning.