Alvin Corneal

Since my re­turn home from Lon­don, amidst the tremen­dous wel­come par­ty which seems to be still tak­ing place in dif­fer­ent parts of the coun­try, the call for im­me­di­ate as­sess­ment of the team's per­for­mances has been men­tioned in more than one cir­cle. With­out any form of elab­o­ra­tion, it leaves one to won­der how would the de­f­i­n­i­tion of as­sess­ment and analy­sis be in­ter­pret­ed by the stake­hold­ers? Are we re­fer­ring to the ac­tu­al per­for­mances of all the ath­letes who par­tic­i­pat­ed in the Olympic Games or are we re­view­ing the past four years to de­ter­mine whether or not the pro­grammes which were placed on the ta­ble by the na­tion­al as­so­ci­a­tion of the var­i­ous sport­ing dis­ci­plines, or even the ath­letes them­selves, should be analysed. There are those who will look at as­sess­ment in the con­text of whether the funds in­vest­ed in­to the pro­gramme, had sat­is­fac­to­ry re­turns.

Oth­ers will re­view the prepa­ra­tion of the ath­letes from year-to-year in or­der to find out if there was need for ad­just­ment in same for the fu­ture. Quite nat­u­ral­ly, an­oth­er or­gan­ised plan for each sport­ing dis­ci­pline should be laid up­on the ta­ble, now that any de­fi­cien­cies may have been iden­ti­fied in the pre­vi­ous one. With the re­sults which were achieved in a gen­er­al way, the di­rec­tion of progress seemed pos­i­tive, with the num­ber of events which saw T&T reach­ing the fi­nals and in some cas­es, earn­ing medals. The tech­ni­cal analy­ses will be to­tal­ly dif­fer­ent from the ad­min­is­tra­tive pic­ture, and this should come from the tech­ni­cal staff, the sports psy­chol­o­gist, and the ath­letes them­selves. One of the most neg­a­tive pro­ce­dures which is some­times af­fect­ing prop­er analy­sis is the ab­sence of ab­solute hon­esty in in­for­ma­tion that is giv­en. There is the temp­ta­tion to make ex­cus­es for no good rea­son in cir­cum­stances like this, un­know­ing­ly at times, and the re­sults re­flect a false pic­ture. And just who will guard the guards?

No doubt there will be rea­sons and/or ex­cus­es why cer­tain things oc­curred or not, and the truth is the on­ly way to deal with the fu­ture. The ba­sic re­al­i­ty is that for­tu­nate­ly, there is a ma­jor­i­ty of youth­ful per­form­ers com­ing out of Lon­don and they will be the ones to fo­cus their at­ten­tion up­on a well planned fu­ture over the next four years. Fund­ing is a huge is­sue, but this is nec­es­sary for any pro­gramme which is pre­sent­ed com­ing out of the as­sess­ment and analy­sis. What is most es­sen­tial is that there must be an over­all view of all the sports dis­ci­plines which are work­ing to­wards the Olympic Games in Brazil. Not on­ly should be look at the events in which we par­tic­i­pat­ed, but there are sports like hock­ey, men and women, foot­ball, men and women, wa­ter po­lo, and its time some of the peo­ple who love wa­ter sports may wish to be­gin ac­tiv­i­ty in ca­noe­ing etc. The price of vic­to­ry is not cheap, nei­ther is the prepa­ra­tion of teams for the Olympics. Start­ing to­mor­row is too late. There is work to be done now so that time will not be lost. We shall watch and lis­ten with in­ter­est to hear of every as­pect of the de­tails which will kick start our par­tic­i­pa­tion in Brazil 2016.