Said Beverly Walcott of her son, Olympic gold medallist, Kishorn Walcott: "When he couldn't train up here, when the gym at the Toco Composite School was closed, he would go down to Sangre Grande or San Juan". This tribulation begs the question: Why was the Toco talent not being furnished, even with the bare tools, by the now laudatory government?
The honour roll of our Olympians shows most were "made in the USA". Up to this second decade of the 21st century, there still exists no comprehensive, national plan and finishing programme to harness and, thereafter, transport our young talents to optimum achievement.
I know hard-core, track and field enthusiasts who, of long habit, attend down to primary and secondary school sports' meets and speak in awe of so many diamonds in the rough. The old-timers are forever excited by a host of juvenile prospects. Sadly, a majority of these kids fall by the wayside-flowers born to blush unseen and lose their sweetness in the putrid Trini air. A fortunate few "raw materials" escape stagnation and worse, to be, "made in the USA".
It is not that successive regimes, throughout the past 50 years, are unaware of the value of sport and games to youth and community upliftment. Think of a vigorous outreach to the wasteland of youthful energy in the ghettos and countryside.
Nation-building investment of the kind holds no rulership priority for purveyors of bread-and-circus machination. Young talents in the range of athletic disciplines hold no political viability, nor do they warrant significant government consideration, until after they have strutted their "elite" stuff, to elevate T&T on the global stage.
Hasely Crawford, T&T's first gold medallist, based in the USA at the time of his preparation for the Montreal 1976 Olympics said: "I went back home to Trinidad and ask for assistance and my own people turn me down. Ah go show them". How pathetic, more so, when money was then flowing through this state "like a dose of salts".
Yet, look at how prime ministers and cohorts grandiloquently pomp and preen, after the event, to hog the limelight. Does the passing parade of bounders, charlatans and self-servers whom we elect to govern have no human conscience and less shame?
Just when the citizenry thought that corruption and iniquity could not worsen, came the ultimate abomination of our first female prime minister and her "midnight cabinet" of culturally dominant males. It is time for people-power to "rise"; to tar, feather and banish lying politicians, intent on deception, even as they articulate national aspirations on the hustings, to seduce this electorate of "boundless faith in our destiny". By the way, whatever happened to the Aquatic Centre in the west, promised, many moons ago, after George Bovell won T&T's first medal, in swimming, at the Athens' Olympiad? See how back-riders run!
CARL DEDIER
Diamond Vale