Film Mischief: Shedrack Salami’s Beyond Olympic Glory opens with Cynthia Ogunsemilore walking through the streets in her sports attire. Her voice rises gently: “People in the community were saying stuff like, ‘As a girl, why will you go and be fighting boxing?’”
Title card.
Then an aerial shot pulls us over Lagos, zooming into the gritty slums of Bariga where Cynthia grew up.
(Click to Follow the What Kept Me Up channel on WhatsApp)
At first, it seems like another story of triumph against the odds, one that carries the weight of a nation’s Olympic dreams. But very quickly, Salami sheds that idea of national pride. What we encounter instead is the portrait of a woman fighting personal battles bigger than she could have imagined within a country that doesn’t seem to care.
Cynthia’s story could easily have been told in broad heroic strokes (the poor girl from Bariga rising to global recognition), except that the story doesn’t require the angle, and Salami brings this understanding in his direction. He stays close to her breathing, her fatigue, the sound of her coach’s voice mixing with street noise. Even when the film moves to her training in Germany, its pulse remains inward. Beyond Olympic Glory is less about Nigeria’s presence at the Olympics and more about Cynthia’s insistence that her life can mean more than where she began.
Salami structures the documentary like a fight: the early rounds are light and steady, the middle act tightens with exhaustion and the heartbreak of her suspension for a doping allegation just before her Olympic debut. Even in that blow, Salami avoids melodrama. Cynthia’s return to Nigeria is filmed with restraint, her disappointment visible but dignified. “After I saw the banner, I told my daddy to remove it,” Cynthia says of a banner her family has hung in their yard that read “From Slum to Olympic Glory,” to celebrate her return. Salami builds it to let the audience feel, not to tell them what to feel.
Visually, Beyond Olympic Glory is clean and composed. The transitions between Lagos and Germany are fluid — the warm chaos of Bariga giving way to the cooler order of European gyms. Nothing feels overproduced; even the interviews blend seamlessly into the film’s emotional rhythm.
You can tell Salami’s instincts as a cinematographer show. A visual artist who once participated in the Sunny Side of the Doc residency, the vast majority of his works are documentaries and commercials, including Semblance Realism—a short film about Emmanuel Anaiye’s Project 100, an initiative that uses art to fund education for African children—and Symphony of Self Love, a work featuring Sandra Dike, an albino woman learning to love herself in a world that disagrees.
What stands out most in Beyond Olympic Glory is Salami’s human gaze. He isn’t filming a “hero”; he’s observing a person trying to make meaning out of difficulty. The film doesn’t ask for our applause. If it asks for anything, then it is for our understanding. When sports experts appear to explain the complexity of her doping case, their analysis doesn’t distract from Cynthia’s story. Instead, it deepens it, situating her within a larger system that often crushes the very people it celebrates. The documentary becomes, in that sense, a mirror held up to Nigerian sports culture — its uneven structures, its hunger for quick glory, its forgetfulness.
Beyond Olympic Glory is patient and deeply empathetic. In style, the film insists on humanizing instead of glorifying. It may be about an athlete’s interrupted dream, but beneath it lies something more enduring: the stubborn hope of an individual who refuses to let failure define her.
Beyond Olympic Glory screened at The Annual Film Mischief 2025.
Become a patron: To support our in-depth and critical coverage—become a Patron today!
Join the conversation: Share your thoughts in the comments section or on our social media accounts.
Side Musings
- “National pride” looks different when the nation is missing in action. I’m sure anyone who’s been in Cynthia’s shoes understands better.
- Somewhere in Lagos, a neighbour is still saying, “But she’s a girl!”
- Hope is the real performance-enhancing drug here.
- Cynthia has to travel everywhere with amala and ewedu so that she doesn’t starve herself no more.
