Olympic Committee Aims to Bar Wild Cards

Eddie "the Eagle" Edwards, Eric the Eel, and Philip Boit, the Kenyan skier unfamiliar with snow, could be a thing of the past if the International Olympic Committee has its way.

Jacques Rogge, the IOC president, is to put an end to such renegade fun because he believes the likes of Edwards - famous for his inept ski jumping at the 1988 Winter Games - are making a mockery of the competition.

The IOC, chastened by the performance of Eric "the Eel" Moussambani, who swam one of the slowest races in Olympic history at Sydney in 2000, will no longer offer wild cards to smaller countries in an effort to eliminate the participation of such larger-than-life characters.

"We want to avoid what happened in swimming in Sydney," he said. "The public loved it, but I did not like it. The Olympic Games are a mixture of pure quality - that is, the best athletes in the world, and at the same time athletes of lesser quality who achieve universality.

"In the past, we made the error to select these athletes at the last moment. A country would say, 'We have no qualified athletes, can we bring in a wild card?' And these athletes were not good enough."

The 22-year-old Moussambani from Equatorial New Guinea was cheered to the rafters after a solo swim over 100 metres in which it appeared at one stage he might drown.

His two fellow competitors had been disqualified in his heat so he had to race alone, a daunting prospect for a man who had learnt to swim only eight months earlier. Though Moussambani was offered sponsorship deals, interviewed by the world's media, and even flown to London to present an award at the television soap opera awards, it appears Mr Rogge disapproved.

Edwards said: "This is the final nail in the coffin of the Olympic ideal, which has been slowly being eroded for a while. The public enjoy watching these people. They make the games more human and interesting.

"It is going against the grain of the Olympics to deprive people who are the best in their country at a particular sport of the opportunity of taking part."

After Edwards' performance at Calgary in Canada, where he came 56th out of 57 (the 57th was disqualified), the British Olympic Association introduced stricter selection criteria. They specified that any competitor sent to the games had to be capable of finishing in the top half of their event.

It did not stop wannabes from other countries travelling to the games to take part in sports they had often not seen before, let alone competed in. At the 1998 Winter Olympics in Nagano, the former Kenyan runner Philip Boit took part in the cross-country skiing event despite having only recently seen snow for the first time. He finished last, falling down and bumping into the flags lining the course.

Boit's participation in Nagano inspired skiers from Cameroon and Fiji to compete in the games in Salt Lake City four years later. They proved to be equally incompetent but were still loved by the public and media alike. Now the party is over.

Mr Rogge said the IOC would in future ask smaller countries to select their most talented athlete and they would help to prepare them with technical expertise and financial assistance.