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Monday, July 14, 2025

T&T can rise again, thanks to our athletes

by

20130818

The opin­ions which were ex­pressed by the track and field ex­perts cer­tain­ly left many with the im­pres­sion that we shall be push­ing all the best ath­letes for places on the medal ros­trum in the IAAF track and field world cham­pi­onships in Moscow.

It is al­ways re­fresh­ing to lis­ten to the for­mer stars and ed­u­cat­ed ad­min­is­tra­tors, es­pe­cial­ly when their pre­dic­tions have come true.

From that point on­wards, the fo­cus is placed firm­ly on the events and es­pe­cial­ly in which our stars are in­volved.

On this oc­ca­sion, the ear­ly news did not set the plat­form for a mem­o­rable hap­pen­ing, as the news of two of our ath­letes test­ed pos­i­tive be­fore they faced the starter, de­priv­ing this coun­try of the prospects of en­joy­ing a big haul of medals.

The British press was up­beat about the form of their ath­letes and af­ter such a mag­nif­i­cent Olympic haul at home, the sky seemed the lim­it to them.

Five days let­ter, the re­sults ap­peared un­pro­duc­tive to most of our top sprint­ers and maybe the biggest shock­er was the mod­er­ate dis­play of throw­ing the javelin by young Olympic Gold medal­ist Kishorn Wal­cott.

How could it be log­i­cal that the Olympian whose rise to star­dom made him a ray of hope for the fu­ture, and mo­ments of joy for the lovers of sport.

Twen­ty sev­en places down the list­seems un­be­liev­able, al­though his re­cent ef­forts did not im­press any­one who were fol­low­ing his progress.

As I re­flect­ed the events of the past two years, it was not dif­fi­cult to un­der­stand the ab­sence of high qual­i­ty from the guys, maybe with the ex­cep­tion of Bled­man in the sprints, Davis and Je­hue Gor­don.

The on­ly one to show is their mo­tion was the young UWI stu­dent whose ded­i­ca­tion to the sport seemed to ac­com­pa­nied by ex­cel­lent ap­pli­ca­tion.

This is not a state­ment in hind­sight. I was at­tend­ing a sec­ondary schools foot­ball match last Sep­tem­ber at the Hase­ly­Craw­ford sta­di­um, and wit­nessed this young­ster whose Olympic per­for­mances was po­ten­tial­ly good, but not just enough to reach the top on Lon­don.

Be­cause I had al­ready writ­ten an ar­ti­cle about the chances of Je­hue and Njisane Phillips as the two ath­letes who would make us proud in the Brazil Olympics 2016, I felt the urge to in­vite my­self to a con­ver­sa­tion with this el­e­gant­ly built quar­ter­mil­er whose glid­ing over the hur­dles had brought some in­ter­est­ing com­ments from the great Michael John­son.

I took the time to con­grat­u­late him and re­it­er­at­ed my de­sire to see him win gold in Brazil.

In his most hum­ble way, he promised to give of his best al­ways.

Here I was, in the midst of a group of Grins in Lon­don run­ning the best forty min­utes that he had run since in his ca­reer.

All of a sud­den, I felt that our small coun­try has once again risen to a height which many on­ly of­fered glimpse of a chance.

The im­pact was enough to shrug of the fail­ures of the oth­ers and es­pe­cial­ly re­duced the pain of our al­leged drug users.

Of course, I still took the time to await the rea­sons for the mediocre per­for­mances of those who earned the re­spect and fi­nan­cial re­gard from the pub­lic purse to de­vel­op their po­ten­tial and en­dorse their charges promis­es that they would lmedal.

Now we ust look to the re­lay events for fur­ther suc­cess and again, young Gor­don may well be one to join the re­lay team in or­der to add to the medal rank.

Un­for­tu­nate­ly, there was in­suf­fi­cient analy­sis giv­en by the BBC pre­sen­ters and I will re­main glued to the me­dia for rea­sons why our ath­letes were not able to come close to their Olympic per­for­mances.

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