See and hear the confusion surrounding the national anthem in the clip above
The nation of South Sudan was formed as recently as 2011, when they broke away from Sudan.
Olympics in Paris 2024
Canada can reach playoffs despite minus six points
Nebil Ibrahim after the victory in the Olympic debut: “Broken my heart”
Basketball is by far one of the biggest sports in the country, and yesterday they played their first ever game in an Olympic basketball tournament.
Burop in the arena
It was a success: Victory with 90-79 against Puerto Rico.
But the talk afterwards was mostly about what happened before the start of the match. When the country’s national anthem was to be played, it was not “South Sudan Oyee!”, as the country’s national anthem is called. Instead, the organizers started “Nahnu Jund Allah Jund Al-watan”, which is Sudan’s national anthem.
You could clearly see the confusion in the eyes of many players, before the music was suddenly silenced and the arena was filled with boos and the announcer in the arena apologized for “a technical error”.
“Give us energy”
Just over two minutes later, the proper national anthem began to be played, and the match was later able to start – a match that South Sudan thus won.
– It gave us energy. It obviously felt disrespectful when it happened. We think we deserve to be respected. So it felt to us that we then needed to continue to show the world what we are capable of,” said forward Nuni Omoth, according to the AP news agency, adding:
– So this was a kind of proof that people still don’t respect us.
“Not on the map”
Omoth’s teammate Majok Deng was on the same track in The Athletic.
– They have to do better, because this is the biggest arena of them all, and they knew that it was South Sudan that would play. It is not on the map that you can make such a mistake as playing the wrong national anthem, he said, adding:
– It is disrespectful.
The organizers have apologized for the incident. Already during the opening of the Olympics, a number of organizational mistakes were made. Among other things, South Korea’s Olympic squad was presented as North Korea, which led to a telephone conversation between the president of South Korea and IOC president Thomas Bach.