– nothing happens overnight
There is forward movement in the Athletics Association of Guyana (AAG), Committee member Lyndon Wilson said and he urged that fans and stakeholders exercise patience.

“A lot of people want to see overnight results,” said Wilson. “They expect everything to change in one day and that is not possible.”

Wilson said that though things are not really moving fast they are moving nevertheless. “It is shaping up. Things are shaping up in such a way that things are looking different from the way they used to before,” he said.

AAG President Colin Boyce only recently announced the association’s plans involving training at a High Performance Training Centre in Brazil, after the athletics team sent to the Inter-Guiana Games (IGG) in Suriname brought home a loss.

Boyce, in an earlier interview with Stabroek Sport, had blamed the team’s defeat on the fact that several key athletes were unable to attend the event as well as the attending athletes’ lack of preparation.

However, Wilson said the absence of principal athletes was not the real issue since for years this has been an ongoing occurrence. He noted that the IGG and the Carifta Games usually end up being back to back. As such many key athletes opt out of the IGG so as to better prepare for the Carifta Games. Over the years, Wilson elaborated, a “makeshift strategy” has developed in order to shuffle the athletes around the two meets.

He pointed to the fact that many have criticized the team’s loss at the IGG and said that the event has been receiving a lot of “bad press”. But, he lamented, everyone was focused on the team’s loss and not on the athletes’ individual performances.

“They [the press] never spoke about the performance of the athletes. They just spoke of the team’s loss, and though the team lost, the athletes performed well,” Wilson said

He admitted that the real problem was that the Guyanese team had not expected the level of preparedness of the French Guiana and Suriname teams. Wilson said the other two contesting teams had new strategies and a lot of their athletes were new as well.

Wilson said the AAG needs to adopt a different method when it comes to selecting athletes for international events. He said they need to identify the athletes early on, so as to begin the training early.

Wilson said that in the past he has recommended that camps be arranged for the athletes in order to bring them all together and give them the type of training they so desperately need. Because the selected athletes come from various parts of Guyana, the type or level of their training is uncertain.

“It’s hard to train with the athletes because they are spread out across Guyana. We’ve been asking for these athletes to come together, these are things that are not being done,” Wilson said.

“We have to go back to the drawing board, and work on these youngsters,” he added. (Tamica Garnett)