Sean Nero

Get­ting a win­ning team of ath­letes to the Rio, Brazil, Olympics this Au­gust and en­sur­ing the So­ca War­riors mount a suc­cess­ful cam­paign for the 21st FI­FA World Cup in Rus­sia, in 2018 re­mains the two clear pri­or­i­ties of the Kei­th Row­ley-led ad­min­is­tra­tion, said Sports and Youth Af­fairs Min­is­ter Dar­ryl Smith.

Even as fi­nance min­is­ter Colm Im­bert jug­gles the is­sues of low­er than de­sired en­er­gy prices, which af­fect­ed the amount of rev­enue gov­ern­ment has col­lect­ed to meet the needs of cit­i­zens, Smith said ath­letes prepar­ing to rep­re­sent T&T at these events should re­main fo­cused and al­low gov­ern­ment to ad­dress is­sues that arose.

In­side the fi­nal 100-day count­down to the 2016 Rio Olympics, Smith told the T&T Guardian he to date he's still un­able to pro­duce a bud­get for both events.

"Like I have said be­fore, it's the first time I am do­ing a bud­get in pen­cil, so noth­ing is etched in stone. We liv­ing in a coun­try where we know our econ­o­my re­lies on oil and gas. We have be­come ac­cus­tomed to that. From day one, we said Olympics and the World Cup qual­i­fi­er are our two top pri­or­i­ties," he said.

Smith con­tin­ued: "In gym­nas­tics, it's the first time we get a spot there; in row­ing Ms Chow (Fe­lice Aisha); the su­per heavy­weight (box­er) in Mr Paul (Nigel); in cy­cling we have Mr Phillip (Njisane); and we have Mr Gor­don (Je­hue) with the hur­dles. Of course, we are an­tic­i­pat­ing that Bovell (George) is in, and we are an­tic­i­pat­ing the track team. Ato Boldon is do­ing fan­tas­tic work with the women. With his camp, we have Richard "Tor­pe­do" Thomp­son. We have Cleopa­tra (Borel) and a num­ber of oth­ers out there. We are hop­ing we'll have a big team go­ing over. As much as we could pos­si­bly help, we will do our best to help the team."

He added that the Min­istry has stepped in to as­sist Olympic sailor An­drew Lewis, who re­quired ma­jor med­ical treat­ment fol­low­ing a freak ac­ci­dent in Rio, last year, while con­duct­ing pre-Olympic train­ing.

In ad­di­tion, get­ting Olympic swim­mer Bovell to ma­jor cham­pi­onships around the world at which he did this coun­try proud was a cost the min­istry ab­sorbed in the ath­letes con­tin­ued pur­suit and de­liv­ery of ex­cel­lence.

"We had to as­sist him. Mr Bovell is do­ing very good. I want to con­grat­u­late him on win­ning two gold medals. That wasn't part of the bud­get. We as­sist­ed him. As you go through your sea­sons, things prop up. You qual­i­fy for things. We had to cut sev­en per cent from our bud­get. That rep­re­sent­ed $33 mil­lion dol­lars. We are watch­ing the oil price.

"A lot of peo­ple are jump­ing up and say­ing the oil price up in the for­ties, but they don't un­der­stand that three months down the road we would ben­e­fit from that. Min­is­ter (Colm) Im­bert is do­ing a jug­gling act.

"But I will tell you this. It's the ear­li­est our Olympic ath­letes have ever got their cheques and they are very pleased about that."