No Olympic medal in 20 years is scandalous

Sep 29, 2016 Sports

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By Edison Jefford
The pressure mounted on Guyana Olympic Association (GOA) President, K. A. Juman Yassin to gracefully, or as some would have it, appropriately demit office in December was pre-empted last year following his apparent vacation in Samoa.
For those who are interested in reading that assessment, Google ‘The anomaly of personalised sport associations’. Some key revelations about yet another failed sojourn (to the Commonwealth Youth Games) are exposed with candid comportment.
It is ironic that exactly after one year since that article appeared in September 2015, Yassin is under the microscope again. This time, it is performance-based, highlighting Guyana’s obvious lack of success at the 2016 Olympic Games in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.
Yassin has reportedly spent in excess of 20 years at the helm of the GOA, which represents six Olympic Games, spanning the period 1996-2016. Yassin’s legacy is depressing if assessed on the basis of Guyana’s international achievement in Olympic sports.
Realistically, Yassin would not have been allowed to continue in that position in other countries after consistently failing to produce a plan, which guarantees results. However, this is Guyana where anything seemingly goes and an ‘old boy’s network’, as Frederick Kissoon calls it, is allowed to reign at the helm of such a strategically important sport institution.
One of the ‘old boys’ of the GOA had inevitably suspended a talented local cyclist and withheld his license until I exposed the issue and normalcy returned. Officials lose their jobs for that kind of conduct in other parts of the world, but not here.
Today, that individual is still on the GOA Executive. But who keeps them there? It is the very group that constitutes the membership of the Olympic association that continually hand Yassin and cohorts the nod of approval come election time.
If those associations can see nothing wrong with the crass ineptness that has characterised GOA for the past 20-plus years, then who are we to judge Yassin? This is the mystery that sports in this country find itself in, when the very people, who are supposed to be the gatekeepers, carry out the raids. Let me quote from my September 9, 2015 article:
“Sports in Guyana and its culture are not insoluble. Legislation can fix some of the issues while others simply necessitate a changing of the guard; a change of some faces, who, unfortunately, only have stamped out passports and trips around the world to show for their prolonged stay at the helm or within some associations, but no tangible, traceable success”.
Domestically, Yassin has challenged the former Minister of Culture, Youth and Sport, Dr. Frank Anthony on several occasions to do more for sports. One of his most known clashes was the 2012 exchanges over the cricket imbroglio where Yassin openly leveled blame at Anthony in his address at the GOA Awards Ceremony.
Yassin has been outspoken, yet ironically inconsistent on issues, but in terms of putting all the requisite systems in place to get Guyana medals at the Olympic Games, his tenure will be remembered as a failed era that patently lacked vision in moving sports in general in Guyana forward.
Following the Olympic Games this year, there were the big headlines from a statement Yassin had reportedly made in the media: ‘No investment, no medals’, which inadvertently pointed the blame at Government for not doing enough for sports and athletes.
But that was an old stratagem, even a deliberate contemplation of sorts, which sought to blame everyone except Yassin and the ‘old boy’s network’. My colleague Rawle Welch has prompted renewed investigation into the modus operandi of the Olympic association.
If Yassin is to list his legacy, it may end up as a footnote. Four major areas are conspicuous: first, he acquired a piece of land to build a Headquarters for the GOA several years ago; to-date only the fence has been built with no consistent information on a completion date for the facility, and at what cost it will be constructed.
Second, over the past years, GOA gave sport associations necessary financial assistance; thirdly, several local and international athletes benefitted from International Olympic Committee (IOC) Elite Athlete Grants, which is shrouded in secrecy as to who are the beneficiaries and why they were chosen.
The Olympic Association will also tell you that it has sent several persons on Olympic Solidarity Courses in Hungary. This is the fourth major item that Yassin can identify as part of his legacy. There is little else, if any, that the former Chief Magistrate can add.
Annually, GOA hosts an Award Ceremony where it identifies a long list of achievements over the course of the respective year. That lengthy list, however theoretical and achieved through mandatory IOC means, is yet to be converted into what I called “tangible, traceable success” in sports.
As such, that list of engagements cannot be referenced as part of Yassin’s 20- plus year legacy, since it did not produce meaningful results. President David Granger also recognised Guyana’s failure at the Olympic Games in his feature address at the GOA Ceremony this year.
Granger, a trained historian, informed the sports community present at the Georgetown Club that in 68 years of Guyana’s participation at the Olympic Games, the country only managed a bronze medal that Michael Parris won in 1980 in boxing.
“So why do we do so poorly? What we need to do is take the model that we are using and take a fresh look at sports,” the President said in his presentation of the Populist Model for development of sport in Guyana.
“We need to look at the way we have been producing our athletes over those years to see if we need further change to produce better athletes,” Granger observed. I hope Yassin was attentive because that was not a compliment! To be continued.

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