A sick year
By Garth Wattley (Express).
This year in sport is not ending quietly. While top-level competition in these parts may be on a short break, Australia and India are fighting to stabilise their positions in Test cricket during their four-match series. I have been watching and will continue to watch the action as it moves from Melbourne to Sydney to Perth and then Adelaide.
Likewise, I will continue to follow closely Manchester United's English Premier League pursuit of Manchester City over this holiday period. It will be a distraction, albeit a temporary one from the local goings-on in football, cricket, etc.
I think about this year and I feel tired. I sigh. I shake my head, not out of disappointment, sadness or even frustration, but with a recognition that as much as has changed in 2011, nothing is really going to be different in 2012.
If 2011 was a man, what would he be like right now? Old and tired! Worn down by a series of viruses that have been attacking his body for months on end. Actually the viruses—the year's controversies and misadventures—are offshoots of one nasty, malignant, pervasive disease.
Temporarily—for a week here and a week there—"Mr Year" enjoyed peace, even a good time. And then the suffering started again.
From athletics, and the Olympic disciplines primarily, came the good times.
Female sprinter Kelly-Ann Baptiste—fast feet on a diminutive frame—ran consistently and bravely all year. She earned her ranking among the top five sprinters in the world and her bronze medal at the World Championships in Daegu, South Korea, marked her down as a young woman with the mental capacity to compete and even beat the best in the world when it matters most.
If she stays free of serious and untimely injury, an Olympic medal in London 2012 is surely on.
Shooter Roger Daniel with his Pan American Games medals enhanced his profile as a consistent competitor this year.
And match sprint cyclist Njisane Phillip, well, he just continued to raise the eyebrows with times that pushed him closer to true world-class status.
He probably would have expected to get more than bronze at the Pan Am Games. But, at 21, Phillip still has time to fill the trophy cabinet.
London in 2012 is not beyond his reach, once he can get to the remainder of World Cup events and the World Championships before the Games next year.
But it emerged last week that Phillip's future as a Trinidad and Tobago cyclist is being threatened by overtures from the United States.
Njisane is now being coached by Englishman Jamie Staff, the sprint coach of the US team and a recently retired former World and Olympic gold medallist in the team sprint.
It is an arrangement that has been facilitated by the US Cycling Federation. As a consequence, Phillip also has access to US training facilities. The Yankee intention is hardly veiled towards a man currently ranked No.5 in the world in his event.
The Americans' gestures have so far not been matched by the local authorities. While he is part of the Ministry of Sport's Elite Athletes programme, Phillip is yet to receive one full payment. And as of last week, he had not received any of his 2011 funding.
So how has he been keeping his Olympic dream alive at these World Cups? Through some corporate help here at home and in the United States, a little help from the Trinidad and Tobago Olympic Committee, but largely through the financial sacrifices of his family.
Trinidad and Tobago's cricketers in the Elite programme are also waiting on money. Why all this delay? Why no clear explanation about it?
Whether it is purely a case of administrative tardiness or otherwise, local sportsmen are getting the shaft.
As he looks forward to what he hopes will be a big Olympic year, 100 metres man Richard Thompson would want to forget entirely the authorities' failure to have the new track laid at the Hasely Crawford Stadium in time for the National Championships, which, as a result were rescheduled uncomfortably close to the World Championships.
Meanwhile, in football, all the players who were involved in the 2014 World Cup qualification campaign that ended in Guyana will have to live with the pain of that disaster and have it as a black mark on their careers.
But they were being asked to prop up a Trinidad and Tobago Football Federation that had imploded.
Put the series of legal defeats the TTFF suffered against the 2006 World Cup players claiming compensation, together with their inability to pay what is due, together with the sudden flight from football of special adviser Jack Warner and Federation president Oliver Camps—both casualties of the Mohamed Bin Hammam FIFA presidential campaign scandal—and you had an organisation whose true weakness had been nakedly exposed.
Still, I heard TTFF interim president Lennox Watson speaking recently about local football moving forward with the Under-23s, as if all the game needed was to groom a new set of players!
The Trinidad and Tobago Cricket Board did not find itself in such disarray in 2011 but it was still at odds with about half of its clubs over its restructuring of local cricket.
Then, over the last two months, the disputed circumstances surrounding the end of Daren Ganga's highly successful eight-year reign as national captain drew more negative publicity.
In both those matters, it boiled down to who you believed.
As for the Ministry of Sport/Boxu Potts/Boxing Board bacchanal, that was pure soap opera but with damaging implications.
All these viruses kept "Mr Year" steadily under the weather.
But that pervasive disease which really put him down was dishonesty.
At the heart of all these issues mentioned here is a refusal by sporting bodies and their leaders to own up to their errors; and to be committed to doing what is right by their athletes.
The runners, footballers and cyclists will always have to stand by their results in the end. But they have a right to expect to be given every chance to succeed. Not to be set up for a public fall.
I suspect, however, in fact, I know that the "patient" will remain sick in 2012.
Very sick.
