Quadru­ple Olympic gold medal­list Amer­i­can Michael John­son met with the Min­is­ter of Sport Anil Roberts on Wednes­day.

Af­ter in­tro­duc­ing the train­ing pro­grammes of­fered by Michael John­son Per­for­mance (MJP), the con­ver­sa­tion quick­ly shift­ed to the im­por­tance of coach de­vel­op­ment, which the MJP al­so pro­vides.

The Sports Min­is­ter shared his coach­ing back­ground to John­son and high­light­ed the need to im­prove the stan­dard and qual­i­ty of coach­ing in T&T.

Roberts ex­plained that al­though lo­cal ath­letes have ex­celled on the world stage, the coach­ing ex­per­tise has not de­vel­oped along­side the ath­letes in or­der to iden­ti­fy and hone the tal­ent which abounds in most sport­ing dis­ci­plines. Ad­mit­ting that the best ath­letes don't make the best coach­es, John­son agreed that coach­ing is as much a sci­ence as it is an art, and coach­es are fun­da­men­tal­ly ed­u­ca­tors, mean­ing that those, who are best at it, ap­proach the task this way.

Both men al­so dis­cussed the pos­si­bil­i­ty of MJP set­ting up one of their high per­for­mance cen­tres in T&T, or find­ing an al­ter­na­tive arrange­ment for MJP ex­perts to vis­it reg­u­lar­ly and work with lo­cal coach­es and ath­letes. Be­fore the meet­ing end­ed, John­son pre­sent­ed Roberts with a signed copy of his au­to­bi­og­ra­phy Gold Rush.