In the 63 years since independence, literature and academia have often brought Trinidad and Tobago international recognition, but no field has done so more consistently than sport.
From the world championship netball team in 1979, to Hasely Crawford’s 1976 Olympic gold in Montreal, to Brian Lara’s world batting record in 1994, to the T&T Soca Warriors football team qualifying for the FIFA World Cup in 2006, to Keshorn Walcott’s golden arm in 2012, it is our athletes who have consistently forced the international community to look in our direction.
Last week, four-time T&T Olympic medallist Ato Boldon sat down with us for an independence special interview, reflecting on the role sport has played in our country. The interview will air tonight at 7:30 pm on CNC3.
Boldon himself has been a shining light in athletics. After winning bronze in the men’s 100m and 200m at the 1996 Atlanta Olympics, he won silver and bronze at the 2000 Olympic Games in Sydney.
In 1997, he won a World Championship gold medal in Athens. When asked how being an athlete in an independent T&T shaped his identity and sense of purpose, he said, “I talk about it quite a lot, because I talk about the fact that sometimes in my dealings with Black people in America, I go, ‘Thank God that I was born in a place where the prime minister, the president, and everybody in power looks like me.’ I don’t think that a lot of people get a sense of how important that is to a young child and especially to a young child of colour, because when you are born into a world where you see people achieving things for the first time, you also get the feeling that you too can go out there and achieve things for the very first time.”
With T&T enjoying grand success in many different sporting disciplines over the last six decades, Boldon said the Caribbean has shown that it has resilient people. He reflected on how much athletes of yesteryears have been able to accomplish with fewer resources than those who play now.
He added, “We probably have more resources than most, but we use the little that we have and took our spirit, learned as much as we could from those who were a little bit further in the race and knew a little bit more, and we took those things, and we were able to do amazing things. It’s one of the things that I lament now. I say we are doing worse now with more. And I worry that some of our dearly beloved ancestors who have gone before us are looking at us in T&T and going, ‘We did so much.’”
For someone who once aspired to be a footballer but had a talent for running, Boldon would ensure he documented one of T&T’s greatest sporting moments. As T&T edged closer to qualifying for the country’s first FIFA World Cup in 2005, the sprinter started documenting the journey to the 2006 tournament in Germany.
“That is not a memory I will ever forget,” he said.
He produced a film called Once in a Lifetime. He was criticised then for the name of the film, but the national football team has largely struggled to qualify for another World Cup since. Boldon said of the film, “I am not a pessimist, but I’m a realist, and sometimes you too can get confused, and I think because I am such a student of sports history, I was wary at the time. Our sporting history nationally shows that when something happens and it should be like the bright spot and lead to something better, we actually go in the opposite direction. It’s a bittersweet moment for me to look back at.”
Though T&T’s athletes have enjoyed a tremendous amount of success at the international level, the public can sometimes be unforgiving.
Asked whether Trinbagonians are spoilt by the success of their national athletes, Boldon said, “I think that our sporting public, all of us, we got spoiled a long time ago, and we felt like it was always going to be this way. However, it was good enough, and it was always going to be this way. And now we look up; I don’t think sports have ever been worse for us right now, especially given what resources we have, or at least appear to have. It goes back to what I was saying about how we are now doing less with more.
“When we were only winning, when all Ato could do was win a bronze, or when all Ian Morris could do is get fourth, or when Gene Samuel missed a medal in 1984, maybe the criticism was a little too harsh, because now there’s nothing to have, and people go, ‘Wow, how did we get here?’ Well, when you take care of the little you have, you’re rewarded with more. When you scorn the little you have, sometimes the universe finds a way to take it away.”
Despite the challenges facing sport in T&T, Boldon insists it remains one of the most important aspects of life in the country.
