Snow Leopard Retires

Kwame Nkrumah-Achampong, better known as “The Snow Leopard,” has announced he will retire from competitive skiing and will not pursue a spot in the next Winter Olympics.

Below is the full text of a brief interview AfricaNews had with the Snow Leopard at his base in the United Kingdom:

AfricaNews: As the first ever Skier from snowless country like Ghana, how do you feel about it?

Kwame: It is a great experience that money cannot buy and it was a bit of difficult for me because unlike the other athletes, mine was more of a struggle to get there. It was good. It was something wonderful but I don’t want to go through the whole process again. That was my first and last ever Olympics, so somebody else will have the privilege of representing Ghana in future Olympics but for me it was good enough.

AfricaNews: Are you saying you wouldn’t participate in any Olympics again?

Kwame: Yea, I’m not going to break another Olympics, I might just peak for another season just to carry on the continuity while somebody else is being prepared to take-over. So that’s my will, I don’t want it to die with me. I’ll just carry on for another season and help some other people to get on board, that is better than being in a competition for just competition sake. Competition is about playing very well not every time going in there as just a participant. No!

AfricaNews: Any particular reason why you wouldn’t participate again?

Kwame: One, I’m too old and two, I think it is time for me to focus on my family and also back the area work of getting an Olympics team. I should focus on that and some kind of give younger people the opportunity.
Some of the smaller nations, the same people keep coming year after year but my focus is that the young people would be better at skiing than me, so my job is to support them and put in place the structure that would enable younger athletes to go out there and perform better than me. There is no point in me going back and I don’t improve on my performance then it’s a waste of resources.

AfricaNews: With the project you want to establish in Ghana, how is it going?

Kwame: I’m planning to come to Ghana and establish this project to train new skiing team to represent Ghana. But before I come to Ghana, I have to make sure that everything is set-the equipments are ready and I get some people who will volunteer to start the process.
Once the project starts we will get some volunteers from Europe so that we get it done. In the meantime too, I have some athletes from Europe who are Ghanaians and who want to train. I’m putting the whole plan together; the plan and proposals would be placed at the Ghana Skiing team’s website. So if you go there and register, you can download the full plan on what we want to achieve and help us to get there.

AfricaNews: How did the Vancouver Olympics go?

Kwame: It wasn’t too bad, it was ok. We achieved a lot of the goals we set out  to achieve. Ghana was not the last on the finish line; it was another country which was last. So at least, for our first ever Winter Olympics we showed people that we are capable of doing something. So the next plan is to do things better; make more resources available, get more people involve and we see how far we can go.