The Lon­don Olympics Games have been quite re­veal­ing. Sports is no longer part time. It is no longer a ca­su­al fel­low or just by the way. It is no longer a pass­ing mo­ment, a pas­time or a hob­by. Sports now is se­ri­ous busi­ness. British Prime Min­is­ter David Cameron an­nounced yes­ter­day that sports is a great way to uni­fy peo­ple. Per­haps he is not alone. In T&T, we on­ly have to look at the Strike Squad and So­ca War­riors in foot­ball and our T&T crick­et team at the Cham­pi­ons League, to un­der­stand the un­bri­dled joy which sports bring to the na­tion.

Prime Min­is­ter Cameron is plan­ning sev­er­al changes: "If we want to have a great sport­ing lega­cy for our chil­dren, and I do, we have got to have an an­swer that brings the whole of so­ci­ety to­geth­er."

He not­ed that the prob­lem, as far as sports goes, was not sim­ply one of mon­ey, but of "some teach­ers not want­i­ng to join in and play their part." Do we have that same prob­lem in T&T? Be­cause most sport­ing or­gan­i­sa­tions com­plain that it is hard to make in­roads in schools for one rea­son or the oth­er. In that re­gard, our sports and ed­u­ca­tion min­istries need to work to­geth­er. We need to en­sure that our teach­ers un­der­stand their role in this. We must build on the suc­cess of this 2012 Olympic group-12 fi­nals, one gold and three bronze medals. The spir­it and feel­ing of uni­ty in the na­tion could be felt throught the coun­try.

Just as De­on Lendore said af­ter the 4x400 me­tres re­lay team won bronze: "When I looked to the ground in the home straight and saw the shad­ow of the British run­ner, I said to my­self: 'No Way, No Way he is go­ing to pass me now..." These are telling lessons on the de­sire to suc­ceed. It is this at­ti­tude we must adopt. We have learned of the out­stand­ing sup­port giv­en to some of the for­eign per­form­ers-Chris Hoy and Ja­son Ken­ny in cy­cling are the best ex­am­ple. There are 12 back­room staff with these cy­clists. Our own Njisane Phillips par­tic­i­pat­ed in both the match sprint and keirin. He had two sup­port staff. We must un­der­stand that to achieve what we did, with the lit­tle we had, was a trib­ute to our young ath­letes.