Guyana would do well to contemplate the rich rewards that Jamaica continues to reap from its investment in athletics at the schools’ level
Jamaican track and field athletics has now far surpassed West Indies cricket as the Caribbean’s best-known and most globally marketable ‘product’ and recently, the Senegalese President of the International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF) Lamine Diack recommended that the Caribbean Community member state’s focus on sport at the junior level provides an example which both we in the region and the rest of the world should follow. “The future of our sport is in schools,” Diack told the BBC Caribbean.
The IAAF President’s glowing tribute to the phenomenal accomplishments of our sister Caribbean country puts into perspective Guyana’s own overwhelming failure to make anything remotely resembling a comparable mark in the discipline of sport.
If comments of this nature have been known to provoke frowns of disapproval from personages in high authority, no amount of intemperate responses will obscure the fact that even if we set Jamaica aside, Guyana is still way behind much of the rest of the Caribbean in terms its accomplishment in Sport.
Sport development, Diack correctly insists, begins with its infusion into the schools’ curriculum. ‘CHAMPS’ is the local name given to Jamaica’s annual Secondary Schools Boys and Girls Athletics Championships and speaking in Jamaica just weeks before the March 24th to 28th centenary Diack showered glowing praise on “the single largest annual junior track and field competition in the Caribbean,” which attracts an estimated 80,000 spectators including Colleges and Universities and corporate sponsors from the United States and elsewhere. No other event, not even test cricket, attracts those numbers over a corresponding period here in Guyana.
By comparison, our own Annual National Schools Athletics Championships has become noteworthy for poor organization, wholly sub-standard facilities, little high-profile support and low levels of spectator attendance. On the whole sport at the schools level in Guyana has been reduced to seasonal distractions where interest in the entertainment provided by blaring sound systems far exceeds interest in performances on the track.
Over the years there has been no serious effort to take schools’ athletics to what is loosely described as ‘the next level.’ Years of sterile debate over the creation of an all-weather track have now reached embarrassing proportions; considerations of cost simply cannot, at this stage, be considered an even remotely justifiable reason for the absence of what, surely, is the most basic of requisites for raising the standard of athletics at least to the level of some of our smaller sister CARICOM countries. In the absence of this basic amenity we can do no more than stand and applaud the accomplishments of Jamaica, achieved through careful planning, a recognition of the role of sport in nation-building and an incremental investment in both the physical and human resources necessary to produce international stars of the calibre of the legendary Donald Quarrie and, in this new millennium the amazing talents of the already legendary Usain Bolt.
What has made Jamaica’s Secondary Schools Athletics meet a local and international success is the fact that it has been a breeding ground for some of the country’s and the world’s most successful athletes including Olympic gold medalists Melanie Walker, Veronica Campbell-Brown and, of course, Usain Bolt. Since competing in its first Olympic Games in 1948 Jamaica has won 53 medals – 13 gold, 24 silver and 16 bronze (Databaseolympic.com). Guyana, by contrast, is yet to win an athletics medal of any sort in athletics at the Olympics. The contrasting fortunes of the two countries are not accidental. Jamaica has long recognized the invaluable role that its track stars can play in the global marketing of things Jamaican. We on the other hand appear unwilling – not unable but unwilling – to invest in sport.
Nor would it be anything less than being evasive to suggest that a comparison between the accomplishments of the two CARICOM countries in the field of athletics is unfair. What Jamaica has done that Guyana, clearly, is yet to do, is make a deliberate and sustained investment in sporting excellence, confident in the knowledge that it will pay off for the country as a whole. And pay off it has. In the wake of Bolt’s phenomenal feats in Beijing in 2008 Jamaica benefited from levels of international marketing which it would not otherwise have been able to afford. Setting aside the spin-offs in terms of tourism and international trade, outstanding Jamaican sportsmen and women like Bolt, Campbell-Brown and Walker afford their country invaluable positive publicity every time they grace the international athletics stage.
Official support for sport in schools in Guyana follows a pattern of going through the motions. The regimen of training and coaching which ought to precede participation in schools’ athletics is altogether non-existent and the physical conditions of the surfaces on which athletes are expected to perform is nothing short of a disgrace. More to the point, in the absence of facilities and amenities that enable realistic comparisons between the performances of our athletes and those from schools in other parts in the region we really have nothing against which to measure ourselves.
Recently, this newspaper learnt that the Board of Governors of one of the country’s top secondary schools vetoed a planned visit to Trinidad and Tobago for an athletics meet. Part of the same group had recently returned from a sports activity in Barbados. Without knowing the full facts of the matter it has to be said that local schools’ officials have not traditionally evinced any great appetite for sport as an integral part of the school experience and even the routine physical exercise regimes that are a part of the curriculum are not followed with any great adherence in the state school system.
While we continue to pay much lip service to sport as a nation-builder, the example of Jamaica and how much its athletes have paid their country back on account of a more wholehearted investment in athletics at the schools level provides poignant evidence that, lip service notwithstanding, we are far from serious about sport.