“All of us are from the West Indies!”

Aug 18, 2013 Sports

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Colin E. H. Croft
You may remember that very poignant scene in the 1993 film “Cool Runnings”, which highlighted exploits of Jamaica’s first bobsled team, at 1988’s Winter Olympics in Calgary, Canada.
Just, finally, after tremendous effort, hard work and some luck, qualifying for the final runs, the crowd asked, highly incredulously:  “Where are these guys from?”

The loud, proud answer, from the crowd, and producers of the film too, was a fanatical “Jamaica!”
With the 2013 Winter Olympics only weeks away now, in Sochi, Russia, we should all remember Devon Harris, Dudley Stokes, Michael White and Nelson Stokes, aka Derice Bannock, Sanka Coffee, Yul Brenner and Junior Bevil, respectively, in the film.
If ever there were absolute pioneers in Caribbean sports, like inaugural 2013 Limacol Caribbean Premier League, these guys certainly were the originals!
Along with then outlawed and castigated coach, Howard Siler, “Irving Blitzer” in the film, they changed the history of Winter Games forever.
Hot blooded people from a hot country were on the winter map!
Some may know that I, loosely, collect sporting memorabilia, so one of my most prized possessions is a Winter Olympics pin given to me by Dudley Stokes and Devon Harris, whom I met in Jamaica years ago.
But back to the present.
With much hooballoo and agro about performance enhancing drugs in sports; special mention to cycling and athletics; we must be eternally grateful to Jamaicans Usain Bolt and Shelly-Ann Fraser-Price, and Trinidad & Tobago’s Jehue Gordon, for lifting dark clouds that still threaten to engulf Caribbean athletics.
After all, Trinidad & Tobago’s Kelly-Ann Baptiste and Semoy Hackett, with Jamaica’s Veronica Campbell Brown and Asafa Powell, are, among others, still under quite severe and extensive drug investigations.
Hopefully, they would all be found not guilty, not even liable, and could continue their mostly stellar careers.  Time will indeed tell that full story.
But when our athletes win, clean and fair, they represent all of us.   Yes, we are all from the West Indies!
Bolt, such a phenomenon, and absolutely unique, will probably end up with so many records that none of us now alive will see them broken in our lifetimes.  He is truly in a class of his own; a legend of any time!
But it is Fraser-Price, who has operated and almost lived in the shadow of VCB, who must be applauded most.  She just, as Ato Bolden suggested, focused on the job at hand, forgetting all happening around her.
Gordon won only the 2nd Gold Medal at Worlds for T&T, after the said Bolden, back in 1997, won gold in Athens in 200 meters, and who, it must be applauded too, suggested, long ahead of time, without any  prejudice or insularity whatsoever, that he expected Gordon to win that 400 meters hurdles race.
Gordon Greenidge, head coach of Trinidad & Tobago’s Red Steel, in Limacol Caribbean Premier League, is generally correct in suggesting that LCPL will never fully eliminate insularity in the Caribbean, but at least, we can all celebrate these athletic wins as if each athlete was from our own country or island, regardless!
Personally, and I have said this many times in my own sporting life, even with a Guyanese passport, still, that I stopped being “Guyanese” when I first played for West Indies Youths, against England in 1972.
I know that this is very hard to understand or appreciate, but then, and afterwards, in the senior team, I became West Indian, absolutely forgetting the “smallness” of just one country, but representing a region!
Having been ostracized, criticized, even recently being outright eliminated from being involved in West Indies cricket, including LCPL, I still will always support our sportsmen and athletes, and would dare anyone to show me anywhere, otherwise, where I have been anything but honest and objective.
Unfortunately, per Gordon Greenidge and others too, objectivity does not always work in the Caribbean.
As one supporter once said to me; “Crofty, we agree with all of what you say, but remember, that is also we team too!”  In other words, if you do not agree with what they think or say, then you are against them!
Anyway, this question has been asked before, but can you imagine, without any possibilities, of course, what a force an all-West Indian athletics team would be, and could have been in the past, with athletes like Merlene Ottey or Bolden included, or later, with Bolt, Gordon and Frazer-Price under one flag?
Even the all-conquering West Indies cricket teams of the 1970’s and 1980’s would have had to take a back seat to the athletes, so many and such high standards we have set, as a region, in that sporting practice.
Bolt and Fraser-Price, especially with the world trying desperately to find some form of its own reality as to why Jamaicans are so successful in athletics, must have been drug tested more times than lab rats are tested, for new medicines, before being given to humans.
Neither has even had a murmur.  That, in itself is so great!
Yes, these special, wonderful athletic victories must be celebrated fully, by all Caribbean people! Enjoy!

 

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