GARY GRIFFITH

ON BEHALF of the National Transformation Alliance (NTA), I congratulate and thank all the athletes and officials who represented our country at the recent Olympic Games. Their dedication and commitment made our country proud. However, we must also highlight the disappointing response from Prime Minister Rowley, who only praised Jereem Richards while disrespectfully failing to mention the other athletes who represented us at the Paris Olympics.

Beyond this slighting of the majority of our Olympic contingent, it is clear to me, as someone with experience in and with national sporting teams, that the current problems do not stem from a lack of quality in our athletes, but from a lack of support from our administration. And this is a problem that has existed for decades, as only a handful of us who have been in Cabinet, in a government, having first-hand knowledge of being involved in national sporting teams.

The country will recall that in 2012, under the People’s Partnership administration, we secured four medals at the Olympic Games, including a gold. This was the only Olympics during our time in office and three Olympics later, under this present Rowley-led administration, we managed just one bronze medal in 2016 and for the last two Olympics in 2020 and 2024 we had a virtual "guava season."

Proper facilities, training, equipment and technology that are standard worldwide are not being provided to our athletes locally. For comparison, American universities are better resourced than what is provided for our national athletes in our country, which is why successful nations at the Paris Olympics, including those in the Caribbean, utilise facilities in North America. It is unacceptable that universities in the US have better facilities for our athletes than we do locally.

We need the same type of technology, equipment, training and professional coaches to move our athletes from just qualifying to being finalists, and from being finalists to medallists.

As a demonstration of just how badly our athletes are being and have been treated, I recall athletes being forced to raise funds on their own to see a therapist for injuries mere weeks before international tournaments.

Yet when they succeed they are paraded all over the country and have their names attached to monuments such as planes and buildings. But this is all cosmetic since there is little follow-up support and, more importantly, it does not trigger anyone in charge to think that we could have this on a much larger scale if we simply properly resourced sportsmen and sportswomen

before they became famous.

This issue is not confined to the Olympic Games. For four years we have been unable to play hockey due to the Government’s failure to assist the TT Hockey Board in developing a field. This is exacerbated by the misuse of the artificial field built at the St James Barracks when I was commissioner of police, due to petty political reasons that has seen no national hockey league for four years running.

The national football team also