Insofar as we have, over the decades, given back anything meaningful to that handful of local athletes who have ‘done us proud’ on the international stage, what we have done, for the most part, has been limited to affording them some measure of public exposure and from time to time handing out modest honoraria that do little justice to the recognition that they would have brought us on the international stage.
When athletes perform creditably on the international stage, effectively placing our country on a global ‘winners row,’ their compensation should be life-changing, no less. This one might add is not an argument for ‘raiding’ the public treasury every time we ‘strike gold’ in the sports arena. There are a host of other ways in which we, as a country, can demonstrate our appreciation of the value of their accomplishments.
Perhaps more to the point the officially created slogan of some decades ago titled ‘sport as a nation-builder’ should have been afforded much more meaning than has been the case. With hindsight, it ended up coming to be seen as no more than a political contrivance designed to cause the nation to see itself as what it was not.
That circumstance has remained unchanged over the years, the most poignant proof of this manifested in the fact that save and except for the Providence Stadium and the National Track and Field Centre we have not, again over several decades, created a single sports facility that points unerringly in the direction of a determined political decision to make sport a jewel in our national crown. Others are said to be in the works.
Almost everything about sport in Guyana has, historically, been a matter of undisguised political tokenism. Had this not been the case we would have long seriously addressed issues like the creation of a reasonable physical infrastructure within which sports of all types would have been nurtured, investment in a cadre of coaches and instructors sufficiently adequate and sufficiently qualified to signal a serious national intention to provide compelling incentives for our youngsters with the talent and the inclination and a broader official dispositional inclination to go beyond propagandistic tokenism.
If we were to be true to ourselves, a pall of tokenism and attendant mediocrity have hovered over sport in Guyana for decades. From the standpoint of the state it has always been a matter of excursions into episodes of blatant ‘short-changing’ in the treatment of our sportsmen and women. Indeed, across the realm of sports disciplines we continue to have to endure some of the most glaring examples of ineptitude, incompetence and worse from those who ‘run things.’ Add to that the fact that we have a Ministry of Sport that has always enjoyed a lesser level of official recognition than its counterparts and we come to a fuller understanding as to whether growing a national sports profile that goes beyond the existing chimera has ever really been seriously attempted. There is no ‘system’ that is wedded to the goal of making rational and incremental advancement. We follow a ‘formula’ that resembles the option of making it up as we go along.
The problem here (or at least a significant part of the problem) has been an abject historical failure on the part of government to momentarily set aside the ‘on field’ dimension of sports of the various kinds, and recognize and seek to emulate the efforts of other countries, some of which are no better off than our own to transform sport into what one might call a Foreign Policy tool through which to ‘sell’ the bona fides of our country. In that sense and from the standpoint of the examples of other countries, we have, over the years, and for all the shouting, hopelessly missed the bus. Here in Guyana it very much appears that we ‘do’ sport simply because it is the ‘done thing.’ It does not appear, even remotely, to have a bearing on considerations of national pride and international prestige.
Some sports have been marginally (only marginally) luckier in this regard, that better fortune deriving from the fact that those sports attract, for the most part, active participants and enthusiasts possessed of the material wherewithal to sustain the particular discipline. Soccer and athletics are decidedly not on that list. These have been left largely to government and to the various Associations to create an enabling environment in which they can thrive. The evidence that they have failed, over the years to deliver, is unmistakable.
Contextually, the recent performance of Guyana’s Commonwealth Youth Games Team is nothing short of a breath of fresh air for sport in Guyana which, for the most part, is often inclined to make a great deal of noise but to say little. Here it has to be said that the not insubstantial financial ‘consideration’ that has been afforded the quartet, as individuals, cannot, by any means, be regarded as the end of the matter. The government and the people of Guyana owe them much more. Certainly, the government and its assorted sports owe our champions a response that raises their own games and ceases to see sport as a less consequential appendage to a wider mission.
