Heello Ato,
I know this is T&F thread. How come TT cycling did not send anybody this year. I thought Ibrahim was going since he got a silver in the PANAm games. And then the track cyclist won some medals at the hemispere championship in S. America recently
T&T Cycling misses out on Olympics
BY MICHAEL PHILLIPS
For every athlete the Olympics is the ultimate focal point. The dream of being an Olympian or stepping foot on the podium to receive a medal and hearing ones national anthem play is a vision that is replayed over and over in an athlete’s head.
The question that I have been getting regularly from cycling fans is one regarding the obvious absence of any of our national cyclists at this year’s Begin Games. The simple answer is that it has become far more complicated and expensive to get to the Olympics. It used to be that the local Olympic committee set a qualification standard for all sports and athletes would have to attain these standards by a designated time.
If more than one athlete did the standard and there was an allowance of only one per country in the event, there would usually be a trial to select the best. In a worst case scenario politics or favouritism would play, but that is another
article.
The thing is that those standards could have been done at home and they were a lot more lenient than today. The process started to change after the Barcelona Olympics in 1992 where the first professionals were allowed to compete at those games. World politics was evolving and that too had its impact on the games for example, no longer was East and West Germany competing under separate flags. The Union Cycliste International (UCI) the governing body for cycling informed its affiliates that they would have to qualify for the 1996 Atlanta Games at the World Championships the year before and the spots were limited for the first time.
Most events allowed 24 cyclists with one or two per country. The 1995 World Championships in Bogota Colombia remain today the largest attendance ever for a world championship event. Many records were broken and as well many were disappointed.
This also represented the last time that T&T had a cyclist participate at the Games, that cyclist being Gene Samuel who qualified for his pet event the 1KM time trial. The qualification for the Sydney Olympics became even more challenging as UCI now expected cyclists to qualify for the World Championships through five World Cup events held in different parts of the world. Only the top eighteen would qualify for the championships from those World Cups with only the top ten in each event getting points to determine ranking.
This is where it started getting very expensive because if you could not attend all of the World Cups you better get good points in the ones you could attend. The fun did not stop there. Finally to qualify for the Olympics you had to be in the top four of your event or be in one of the top sixteen team sprint teams (The team sprint is like the 4x100meter relays except you have three riders) in the championships. Each of the cyclists on the team would then be eligible to ride one individual event. I hope I have not lost you. This meant if you were the fifth to eighteenth fastest at the world Championships - “no Olympics”.
This also meant that that the greater chance for the any country to qualify for the event was through the team events. I had the agonizing experience of being in the fifth to eighteenth group without having a team or even another Trinidadian qualify for the championships. I did like the old people say and chalked it up to experience.
The news gets worse. Since then the qualification process has become even tougher and now there are fewer countries qualifying for Olympic cycling. It is not only the process that has become extremely challenging but the advancement in training and the standard facilities around the world have clearly defined a line between eras. The future for young aspiring T&T cyclists and their Olympic dreams may seem more farfetched than a realistic goal at this time.
However, I am an eternal optimist with a roll up your sleeves and change things attitude. My disappointments had inspired me at a young age to get involved in a meaningful way to prove the value of this sport. The road continues to be a challenging one with many details still to be sorted and structure to be applied from the perspective of the Trinidad and Tobago Cycling Federation. There is evidence of hope in the young riders that being developed at this time and the fact that T&T cyclists have won a record seven medals at the Pan American Championships this year.
I would like to say to cyclists like Chris Sellier and the other young cyclists to keep focusing on your goals, learn from every victory and every disappointment and whatever the outcome hold true to the spirit of sportsmanship and the spirit of the Olympics.
