GUYANA CAN ALSO STUN THE SPORTING WORLD

Aug 28, 2008 Features / Columnists, Peeping Tom

The past few weeks saw Olympic Fever in Guyana. Though that fever has given way to the Carifesta bug, I believe that there are certain points which need to be made about Guyana’s failure to secure Olympic medals over the years.

As far as my memory goes, Guyana has only one Olympic medal – a bronze medal won by Michael Parris in boxing. Guyana has not had a podium position, as far as I can remember, since then.

This, of course, is in stark contrast to countries such as Jamaica, Trinidad & Tobago and the Bahamas, which have continued to win medals at Olympic Games, particularly in the field of athletics. How does one assess the success of these athletes as compared with our country?

There are some who will argue that it boils down to facilities. They will point to the fact that the Trinidadians, Bahamians and Jamaicans have track and field facilities which we do not have.

In the case of Trinidad and Tobago, they have had these facilities for a long time and yet for sometime it did not lead to the sort of success that the Jamaicans and the Bahamians have had in athletics.

Tradition of course has played a part in the success of Jamaica. It has always produced quality male and female sprinters dating back to the great Don Quarrie and Merlene Ottey. This tradition has been maintained over the years and now has been surpassed at the Beijing Olympics.

Usain Bolt won both the 100 metres and 200 metres, shattering the world record on both occasions, and then went on to help his team win the 4 x 100 metres relay . This performance was one of the highpoints of the Olympics.

On the distaff side the Jamaican women who were considered unbeatable bungled the baton pass in the 4x 100 metres relay and went out of the competition.

It was evident, however, that both the female and male teams were the strongest the Jamaicans fielded in any Olympics.

Accounting for this tremendous success, I believe, goes beyond tradition and facilities. The key to the success of the top Caribbean athletes has been exposure to the United States athletic circuits.
Many Jamaicans train in the United States.

Many of them have advanced their athletic careers by winning sports scholarships to colleges and universities in the United States.

I believe, therefore, that if Guyana is to improve its standards of sport in all disciplines, the key has to be to provide international exposure to our young promising sportsmen.

We can go and get some foreign country to build an athletic stadium for us; we can invest in facilities as we are doing.

However, we are too small a country, with too few athletes, for domestic competition to throw up world champions, without such individuals being exposed to the advanced training methods that are available in the more developed countries.

We need facilities, true, but more than that what we need is an investment in our young people. We need to identify the talent and to ensure that our talented sportsmen and sportswomen are given opportunities to go overseas to train with the best in the world, whether it is on the US collegiate circuit or within the former Soviet Union, which despite its relatively disappointing performance at the Beijing Olympics still has the means to produce top class athletes.

The Government of Guyana has spent more on sport than ever before, but a great deal of this spending is being used to run an extremely beefy bureaucracy.

We do not, for example, need a Department of Youth and Sport. In fact, the monies spent on having a Ministry of Culture, Youth and Sport would be better diverted to providing scholarships for our young athletes and sportsmen, so that they can go overseas on short stints and gain the type of exposure that they need.

Guyana should develop a twelve-year plan with the goal of winning medals at the Olympics of 2020. We should try to imitate the Chinese who demonstrated the importance of early preparation. We should begin to identify talent in all areas and to seek the necessary exposure for this talent.

Only in this way can Guyana hope to one day match the performances of their sister Caribbean powerhouses, the Jamaicans, the Trinidadians and the Bahamians.