Sports have never been my thing. But the boss lady has a big thing for tennis and the Olympics, so I've been slowly understanding of the motivations, challenges and the meaning of success for athletes at the top of their form. It's been surprising, then, to hear the way people respond to the performance of our athletes in the 2012 Olympiad. It's as if all the talk of "medal hauls" and "precious metal" has somehow eroded what it means to not just compete in the Olympics, but to participate in the finals and semifinals of these intense athletic competitions. In that misunderstanding, it seems that there's something we still need to understand about the words "work" and "success." The size of our country has a lot to do with such considerations. T&T has just 1.5 million people, less than the populations of most cities and even some towns in the developed world. For nations competing in the Olympics, part of the process is a game of numbers. If a country can sift through its human capital using orderly methods of evaluating athletic potential then it can muster larger numbers of competitive individuals for its teams.
Beyond sheer numbers, the efficiency of the process of identifying talent plays a significant role in building the cohort of athletes necessary for a truly successful Olympic presence. That's one of the reasons why the medal leaders by a significant margin in this year's competitions are America and China and why the now fragmented Russia is so much less of a threat. Visit medalspercapita.com to see it summed up nicely. Our best contenders use the training systems of the American collegiate system and they let us, hoping that our best will choose to play for the bigger team. Our biggest asset in the Olympics, then, is patriotism. The working life of an Olympic athlete is short. Most qualify for just one Olympiad, far fewer get to two and it's rare to find an athlete qualifying, far less competing at the top of their game for three gatherings of the world's athletic elite. Such is the focus on success as medals at this level that two of our finest athletes, Richard Thompson and George Bovell, felt moved to apologise, yes, to tell T&T that they were sorry, after challenging the world, beating dozens of exemplary athletes to get to the final lineup and robustly representing this country. What should we learn from this?
To truly succeed in global competition, you need to marshal the human capital of a nation and prepare systems and training to identify specific talent and aptitude and press it to beneficial use. The thing is, we already know this. This is how we've found oil and gas here for more than a hundred years. We've just never applied the principles to refining people. Our most amazing successes have been those of individuals, the sui generis marvels like Vidia Naipaul, Hasely Crawford, Brian Lara, Winnifred Atwell and so many more. T&T's Olympians in 2012 taught us another lesson: that many of us rising into the global top ten of our craft can be as motivating as the brilliant uniqueness of singular shooting stars. Suppose we all woke up tomorrow and decided to work to make it into the finals of the thing that we do? What if our education system abandoned the nurturing of mediocrity and coached, improved and challenged students to aspire to such a goal. Being in the top ten. How much more attainable being number one must seem once you get there.
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