In the same week that Jamaica, was premiering the film ‘I Am Bolt,’ one of what, no doubt, will be, many projects celebrating the magnificent accomplishments of a native son who rose from modest circumstances to become history’s most accomplished track athlete, the National Assembly in Guyana was debating the country’s budgetary allocation for sport in 2017. While other CARICOM countries are, these days, winning Olympic medals as a matter of course, we are finally allocating monies for the creation of synthetic tracks in some of the far-flung Regions of the country.
Sport is not one of those budget items that sparks the kind of frenetic parliamentary confrontation usually associated with other portfolios, health and education, being among the best examples; that has to do, largely, with the fact that government, has had a poor track record, as far as recognising the nexus between sport and national development. We have done pretty okay at lip service, embracing the slogan ‘sport as a nation-builder’ in the process of mouthing an entirely unfulfilled commitment to this particular aspect of our lives.
It is worth recalling that it was only in 2007 that we acquired our first Cricket Stadium – to coincide with the 2007 Cricket World Cup – and in 2015 that our first Track and Field facility was officially opened at Leonora. Given the distance which the rest of the world, including several sister Caribbean countries (Jamaica and Trinidad and Tobago being the noteworthy examples) have travelled, the quality of our national sports infrastructure – including both physical facilities, an organised regime of sports embedded in the school system and trained sports instructors and administrators – is nothing short of an embarrassment. There is no sport for which a persuasive argument can be made for a correlation between significant state investment and a satisfying level of national accomplishment. In the case of cricket, for example, there is no correlation between the heights which some of our cricketers have climbed (Shivnarine Chanderpaul comes immediately to mind) and the input which the state has made in those accomplishments. Some of the other sports in which Guyanese have made a mark on the local, regional and international stage (squash and Nicolette Fernandes come to mind) have been sustained mostly through the efforts of supportive families and Clubs and the private sector.
Nowhere has the official indifference to the development of sport reared its head more prominently than at the level of our schools where the one-off National Schools Championships usually takes place against the backdrop of an annual event euphemistically referred to as “school sports,” the overall objective of which is sufficiently dubious as to cause even teachers, including some Heads of schools to describe it as a counterproductive distraction from the curriculum. It is not, they point out, that they are averse to the infusion of athletics into the curriculum, but rather, that they fail to see the correlation between an underfunded and often poorly planned and executed regimen of sport at the school level and the enhancement of our prowess as a nation of sportsmen and women.
Granted, the likes of Usain Bolt are not born every day and it does not necessarily follow that more investment in terms of official interest, finances, infrastructure and technical expertise will mean that we will produce world beaters. The point to be made here, however, is for all the official lip service allotted to sport over the years we have little by way of real achievement to show for it.
So that while a sister Caribbean country was celebrating the accomplishments of their “global hero” whose magnificent career had its genesis in a society no better-appointed than our own, we are still debating the funding of our first wave of decentralised synthetic athletics tracks and still light years away from raising the standard of our sports administration to the level of a Jamaica or a Trinidad and Tobago. After all the years of lip service, we are still, it seems, no closer to understanding that Usain Bolt has emerged not just as a truly outstanding athlete but as a lucrative return on his country’s investment in sport. What Bolt’s accomplishments have brought (and will continue to bring for years to come) his country in terms of global marketing would almost certainly be beyond what his country would otherwise have been able to afford. That is what he is giving back to his country. Meanwhile, light years behind much of the rest of CARICOM (to say nothing about the rest of the world) as we are, Guyana remains seemingly unmindful of the lesson afforded right here in our own backyard.
