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– Guyana may not participate in tennis
By Rawle Welch
President of the Guyana Olympic Association (GOA) K.A Juman Yassin told the media that Guyana will be represented in three of the five disciplines that will be contested at the inaugural Caribbean Games in Trinidad and Tobago in July.
K. A. Juman Yassin
Juman Yassin was reporting shortly after returning from a Meeting of Heads of the Caribbean Association of National Olympic Committees (CANOC) which was held in Curacao.
Affeeze Khan
From the inception, CANOC had provided a number of guidelines for eligibility to participate in the event which it said aims to attract the crème de la crème of the region’s athletes in the respective disciplines.
They released the decisive factors for qualification for all the disciplines and that disclosure has precluded Guyana from participating in Volleyball and Netball, but after speaking with International Tennis Federation Development Officer for the English-speaking Caribbean Anthony Jeremiah recently, the two above-mentioned disciplines which we were excluded from might not be the only ones we will be absent from if you’re to judge from comments made by the Officer.
He stated that only 48 players will be eligible to compete in the tennis segment and because Guyana is not one of those countries which have a vibrant presence at regional tournaments it therefore places us in a difficult situation to get players considered for selection to participate in the tournament.
Jeremiah said that Guyana currently does not have active players on the regional circuit and that could prove to be a negative in terms of securing spots among the list of players who’re eligible to play.
Colin Boyce
With no news emanating from any quarter as it relates to Guyana’s participation at the Games, it is difficult to ascertain if this information was presented to the GOA Boss, during deliberations at the CANOC Meeting.
It is now the middle of March and that leaves a mere four months, before the Games is due to commence, but to date no information about Guyana’s hopefuls or the intended size of the contingent has surfaced.
Wilfred ‘ Gussie’ Lee
What is more certain is that many administrators will be jostling among themselves to make the trip, not at their own expense, but in an official capacity.
Even though this is more or less standard operations, it is not the correct posture and a more concerted effort is needed by our sport administrators to correct this glitch.
Comparably, a lot more information regarding the performances of other regional athletes at various Meets within the Caribbean and around the world is in the public domain, but little is known about our athletes.
What a dilemma.
For instance, with the dust now settled as to the outcome of the highly publicised Guyana Amateur Boxing Association’s AGM, and the fact that the discipline is still our best bet to gain medals, one would have thought that some amount of news would’ve been obliging from the entity, but instead nothing has emerged.
Guyana’s two best athletes Aliann Pompey and Marian Burnett have both started their 2009 campaign and after a couple of results that was carried in all the dailies, nothing more has been heard about either their performances subsequently or even if they are available.
The treatment of the locally-based athletes seems to suggest that not much emphasis is being placed on them, but what about affording opportunities to sprinters Alisha Fortune and Rawle Green and distance runner Alika Morgan.
They simply cannot stay at home and expect to compete with merit against the best in the region which incidentally includes Usain Bolt, Asafa Powell, Richard Thompson, Shelly-Ann Fraser and Veronica Campbell-Brown.
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