The Guardian website has been running a series for a while now looking at the 50 most stunning Olympic moments. Today they put out their choice for 11th place which just so happened to be one of the most endearing stories in Olympic history: Eric Moussambani, better known as Eric the Eel.

I remember this moment from the Sydney Games in 2000. Many people see the whole thing as a laughing stock, though while amusing, I think those people tended to miss the point. This was the human achievement at its best. For all your elite athletes of which there are few per capita, this man represented the rest of us. Splashing his way up and down the 50m pool in a time that fell seven seconds shy of the time it took Olympic champion Ian Thorpe to do double that distance. His 1min 52.72sec was some 43 seconds outside the qualifying time.

Eric ‘the Eel’ Moussambani was from Equatorial Guinea as The Guardian’s article describes, and eight months before the games had never swam before. In fact, by the time he launched himself head first into the swimming pool he had never even seen an Olympic sized pool and had arrived at the games thinking that his race was over 50m. It’s all he had trained for rather than the actual 100m that he faced. He was self taught, never coached and took advantage of “wild-card scheme, since significantly scaled back, that was established to give athletes from developing countries the opportunity to compete.”

The scene itself was surreal. While he faded over the closing meters to an almost standstill state and the laughter of the 17,000 spectators turned to encouraging cheers, most athletes applauded his effort with Thorpe himself saying that “This is what the Olympics is all about.” Sadly the Olympic President Jacques Rogge disagreed. “We want to avoid what happened in the swimming in Sydney; the public loved it, but I did not like it.” And of course, what the public wants is not what the public gets in the eyes of Rogge because God forbid you might end up enjoying it too much and have too much fun. So rules were brought in that would ensure we never got the pleasure of seeing the real human spirit on display at the Olympic Games again.

“Citius, Altius, Fortius” or in English, “Faster, Higher, Stronger”. That’s the Olympic motto and yes in theory that’s what the Olympics are all about and as such there shouldn’t really be a place for men like Eric the Eel or Eddie the Eagle at the 1988 Winter Games. But we know all too well that so many Olympic champions over the years have gotten “faster, higher and stronger” via methods that were not entirely natural, so it was nice to think that now and again we’d see someone out there a little more like ourselves representing his country and living the dream.

The Guardian article is well worth the read though as is often the case in real life; the story didn’t have the happy ending we might have hoped for, though I do get the feeling that having achieved what so many of us can only dream about — to become an Olympian — should keep old Eric The Eel happy for the rest of his days.

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