Look for my name in Beijing

Jul 27, 2008 Features / Columnists, My Column

Adam Harris is going to Beijing and he would be running the 200 metres. He may not win a medal but he is going to give it his best shot. He is going to fly the Golden Arrowhead.

He can run; he has clocked one of the fastest times any Guyanese has ever run over the distance. And he has not forgotten that his origin lies in Guyana.

I can imagine the shock when Guyanese learnt about Adam Harris being selected on the Guyana Olympic team.

But there was also a light side to this. My friend of many, many years, Gerald McKenzie was the one who called me with the news.

“I see your son is going to the games,” he said early Friday morning. Then came the familiar laugh. G-Mac knows very well that none of my children can lay claim to athletic prowess in the track and field arena.

One of them was a very good footballer and might have actually represented Guyana had he still been living here.

However, he left these shores some 14 years ago and while he played a few matches in New York, he chucked the game altogether because the world of work beckoned and in any case he was not good, or so he felt, to play in the United States league.

But back to Adam. Parents live their lives in their children and while Adam is no child of mine and probably no relation, I am going to live my Olympic dream through him.

I may not hear the last of this because if he performs poorly then the whole of Guyana will be calling me to mock me.

However, back to my Olympic dream. One day not so long ago, Adam’s uncle was in Guyana and he called me with the information that there was a child who shared my name and that he was running pretty fast and that he had made one of the qualifying marks for the Olympics.

The uncle, Mr Van Lange then connected me to Adam’s mother whom I have never met but who knew more about me than I knew about her.

As a reporter and a columnist in the Kaieteur News, she found my name interesting and even remarked that perhaps I was related to her son.

She then asked me whether I could initiate action to have her son represent Guyana in Beijing. I promised to do my best and forwarded the necessary information to Mr Ivor O’Brien.

I heard nothing more except for an e-mail from Adam’s mother, Darlene. The rest is history. Adam Harris is going to Beijing to represent Guyana.

And this takes me back to a time not so long ago when my bubble burst. I thought that I was the only Adam Harris around.

There are many Harrises, some of them actors, but I never heard of an Adam Harris until I set up my e-mail address. Lo and behold the name was taken.

In the ensuing days, weeks and months, people sent e-mail to me at [email protected] and then informed me that they had dispatched certain information. I duly informed them that I never got the intended mail, often to their consternation.

One day I decided to send a mail to that e-mail address and got a reply that indeed the person was Adam Harris, that he was a lawyer operating in Washington and that he was 28 years old.

I then ‘Googled’ the name to find a host of other Adam Harrises, some of them professionals. But until then, I was safe in the knowledge that I had the only name of its kind in Guyana. Now I have competition, pleasant competition.

And this brings me to the issue of most of the Guyanese participating in the Olympics being people who train and ply their trade outside this country.

A few years ago we found that a Guyanese woman qualified to swim for Canada (or was it the United States).

James Wren-Gilkes had to leave Guyana to become a world rater, as did June Marcia Griffith, Aliann Pompey, Marian Burnett and a few others. We did get our only Olympic medal from a homegrown boy, but that was in boxing.

Meanwhile, Jamaica and Trinidad nurture their athletes at home. Their governments have installed world class facilities while we have done nothing. We still put our athletes to run on grass and we use hand-timing.

About 35 years ago, the late Ed Hartley made moves for a track to be laid at what was then the Guyana Sports Club.

He argued that the track could have been picked up and moved from venue to venue and it would have given the local athletes a chance to run on a surface that was akin to an international surface.

Hartley’s idea never took fruit and these days our track and field people must go to Trinidad to run and so post times that would be internationally recognized.

To our credit, we have a world-rated cricket stadium. I think it is time that we spend even more money to put up a track and field stadium.

We need it, unless we prefer to live in the Dark Ages of athletics and have our people jump up and celebrate victories recorded by others in the Caribbean as we have been doing for years.