August 5 joins August 4 as a red-letter day in Burkina Faso’s history. On August 4, 1984, Upper Volta shrugged off its colonial name and became Burkina Faso, meaning Land of the Incorruptible. And, on August 5, 2021—37 years and one day later—Burkina Faso got its first Olympic medal when Hugues Fabrice Zango claimed the triple jump bronze at Tokyo 2020.
August 4, 2021, had brought the Burkinabes some heartbreak when heptathlete Marthe Koala retired hurt during the shot put session. Zango, 28, ended the landlocked nation’s Olympic drought the very next day.
The triple jump was keenly watched this time as two-time Olympic gold medallist and four-time world champion Christian Taylor of the US was sitting it out because of an injury. The podium was open for a new Olympic champion and Portugal’s Pedro Pichardo, the 28-year-old favourite, took the gold with a leap of 17.98m, a national record. Zhu Yaming of China bagged silver with 17.57m, his personal best. Zango came third with 17.47m. In comparison, the Indian male and female records are-- Renjith Maheswary (17.30m) and Mayookha Johny (14.11m).
In 2010, this reporter visited Zango’s hometown, Koudougou, in Burkina Faso’s Boulkiemde province. It is the country’s third-largest city and lies 75km west of the national capital, Ouagadougou (pronounced Waaga-doo-goo). A largely agrarian city with a few textile mills, Koudougou is famous for its market and is a major stop on Burkina Faso’s lone railway line—Ouagadougou to Abidjan, capital of Ivory Coast. The rail link provides the landlocked nation with a crucial gateway to the sea.
“I started with taekwondo and then I dropped it,” Zango told olympics.com. “I started athletics a bit by accident. The major sports in Burkina Faso are football and cycling. You don’t hear a lot about athletics in Burkina Faso. In 2011 I was scouted to take part in a school competition. During that event, a coach from the Stade du 4 Aout, one of the only stadiums with an athletics track in the country, believed I would make a good jumper. I started training with him in 2012 up until 2015. In 2016 I moved to France and trained for two years with a local coach.”
Zango now lives in Lille, France, where he is pursuing a PhD in electrical engineering. He told olympics..com, "Studies are very important especially in an individual sport where there isn’t a lot of money like in football. The day your career is over if you don’t have another plan you can end up in difficult conditions.” Zango said that he eventually wants to be a professor in Burkina Faso.
Interestingly, Burkina Faso hit the headlines in India when prime minister P.V. Narasimha Rao visited Ouagadougou in November 1995—the first Indian prime minister to do so. Rao famously announced assembly elections in Kashmir from here. Overnight, Ouagadougou and Burkina Faso hit the front pages of Indian dailies.
India has had diplomatic ties with Burkina Faso since the mid-1970s. Burkinabe hero and president Thomas Sankara was in New Delhi in 1983 for a Non-Aligned Movement Summit. Today, India does not even have an embassy in Ouagadougou. The embassy which Rao opened in 1995 was run by a chargé d'affaires till July 2002, when it was shut down. On the other hand, the Burkinabe embassy in New Delhi, which was opened in 1996, was upgraded to an ambassadorial station in 2011.
India is now represented in Ouagadougou by Honorary Consul Deepak Ramchandani; the jurisdiction itself is overseen by High Commissioner Sugandh Rajaram from Accra, Ghana.