Dakar, Senegal – Senegal’s teenage volleyball players were training, giving everything they had. And I could see it in their eyes: the flame, that desire to win.

I was with my daughter and could see the effect it had on her: watching another girl her age play for a team, for a chance at gold, for something bigger than herself.

I saw it again when my daughter helped a young boxer wrap her hands, before the fighter slipped on her gloves and threw a punch few adults could withstand, and when she helped a rowing captain into the water.

There is an ease with which teenagers find one another, a friendliness adults seem to have forgotten.

And so the 2026 Youth Olympic Games opening on the world’s youngest continent on Saturday feels fitting, particularly in this sports-crazy city I call home.

Looking around Dakar, almost everyone looks like an athlete.

Surfers paddle out at dawn. Children play basketball and football in the streets. Teenagers wrestle on beaches; others swim towards Ngor Island at breakneck speed. Construction workers, after a day’s labour, gather not in pubs or bars, but on the beach – to train, laugh and listen to music.

Sport is a way of life, but also a reason to be together.

For many in Dakar, visas and money make travel beyond their borders difficult. This time the world has come to them.

The Games were supposed to take place in 2022. Then came COVID-19, and Senegal’s then-president, Macky Sall, asked for more time to prepare. The Olympics would have to wait four years.

In an interview with Al Jazeera, Kirsty Coventry, the Zimbabwean former swimmer and Olympic gold medallist who now leads the International Olympic Committee, described it as a chance for Dakar, Senegal and Africa “to actually show what we’re capable of” – not merely tell the world.

Defying the odds

Senegal, meanwhile, is facing political and financial turmoil.

Billions of dollars of previously undisclosed debt have brought repeated credit downgrades, and the government is negotiating with creditors and the International Monetary Fund.

In a country where money is scarce, the question of what it costs to welcome the world cannot be separated from what the Games will leave behind.

Dakar can feel half built, its concrete exposed, its roads unfinished. Yet the city has done what it can with what it has. Christmas lights have become Olympic rings; and empty water bottles painted in the colours of visiting nations line roads leading towards refurbished venues.

I asked Coventry whether a country had to be wealthy to host an Olympic event.

“No,” she replied. The movement, she explained, needed to make the Games less complex and more affordable, using existing venues rather than demanding new ones.

Despite Senegal’s debt and political turmoil, the land of teranga, of hospitality, is ready to welcome some 2,700 athletes and their parents, coaches and supporters. Some have never been to Africa. Expectations are being tested, sometimes quietly, in encounters no opening ceremony could arrange.

The Olympic flame, meanwhile, has passed from hand to hand. Khaby Lame, the TikTok star known for making millions laugh without speaking, carried it through Dakar. Then came Omar Sy, the actor who plays a thief in Lupin, running through his Senegalese father’s homeland, not like a thief but like a man who belonged, carrying something he was meant to give away.

Online, the jokes from locals came quickly: Would the electricity company embarrass Senegal with a power cut? Why are some business leaders so eager to hold the flame at Games meant for teenagers? Why do adults always want to hog the limelight…?

And increasingly, the Games are unfolding on mobile phones. Athletes film themselves opening their kit, boarding planes, arriving in Dakar, sharing what they find.

Australia has sent 41 teenagers on a journey of more than 24 hours. Britain’s young coastal rowers are preparing to race. Six refugee athletes, based in Africa, are competing under a flag of their own. These teenagers are their own broadcasters, their own brands.

Already, politics has slipped into the Games. Ukraine’s public broadcaster has refused to show the ceremonies because Russian and Belarusian teenagers will compete under their national flags.

The values Coventry spoke of – friendship, excellence, respect and the ideal of neutrality – are harder for adults to practise than to pronounce.

But politics has long accompanied the Games.

Jesse Owens won four gold medals in Hitler’s Berlin in 1936, the year the modern torch relay began. In 1968, Tommie Smith and John Carlos raised black-gloved fists on the podium in Mexico City, protesting racial injustice and poverty.

Pierre de Coubertin, the French founder of the modern Olympic movement, once spoke of sport’s “conquest” of Africa. In Paris in 1900, Haitian-born rugby player Constantin Henriquez became the first known Black Olympic gold medallist.

Bigger than sport

It took more than a hundred years for the flame to come to Africa.

In 2004, Egyptian judoka Mohamed Rashwan carried the flame through Cairo on its first visit to the continent.

But competitive sport did not begin in Greece. Ancient Egyptian tomb paintings show wrestlers locked together centuries before the first recorded Games at Olympia. And Dakar had hosted its own Friendship Games in 1963, helping lay the groundwork for the All-Africa Games.

This is more than a sporting moment, especially for teenagers. Across the world, young people are protesting, hoping to be heard, to be seen, not to be ignored.

Coventry told me they want “genuine and authentic engagement”, not just the appearance of being heard. I thought of the girls training, and how little it took for my daughter to feel part of their world.

When these Games end, the visitors will go. The cauldron will go dark. Dakar will still be unfinished.

The torch will leave. But the flame I saw in those teenagers, and in my daughter, will remain.