Challenges in athlete development
Champion athletes are among the most celebrated people in the world in any historical period. Many of them are celebrated across history. Their achievements are seen as special because they reflect the capacity of men and women to push themselves beyond boundaries set by others who went before them.
Champion athletes often leave the world in a state of awe, and are admired by peoples everywhere for what they have committed to world history and man’s continuing efforts at optimal utilisation of their talents.
But it is also a truism that perusal of the history of champions and the adulation they so often receive from successive generations reflects the growing development of the media in its pursuit of the latter’s own positioning in the global sport industry.
The media’s foray in sport has played a major role in the promotion of sporting achiements and their achievers. It is the media that have often created the mystique that is often attached to those who have become sporting icons and fashioned the influence that they have on their own and successive generations. Importantly too, the media are in large measure responsble for the demise of many a sporting icon, apparently, when it appears in their interest so to do as part of their greater desire to wield strong influence on the communications industry and exact windfall profits.
It is possible therefore to closely examine the challenges that athletes face as they strive after excellence in developing and displaying their sporting talent as an income-generating enterprise. Many unwittingly find themselves as mere pawns in a bigger undertaking than they ever thought possible or ever understood.
As we peruse the varying attempts at explaining the performances of the West Indies cricket team through its own history, we often ignore the fact that. The players are human beings, born as children of our Caribbean post-slavery, post-emancipation, post-colonial, post-federation and post-independence historical generations and experiences. They are amongst the purest reflections of the peoples of each epoch, in every sense, forever engaged in the struggle of our peoples for survival and the pursuit of becoming and being.
Our West Indies cricketers are today, among the purest reflection of contemporary Caribbean society in every aspect; a reflection of the complexities of selfhood, of Caribbean-ness.
Suffice it to say that this is an historic truth of our sportsmen and sportswomen in every part of the world in every histoirical period. Our athletes are no different because they come from another part of the world.
Caribbean sporting history
Lest we forget, for us in the Caribbean, the sport practised by the indigenous people were completely ignored and decimated, for the most part, by the colonisers as they denied and destroyed the civilisation they met on their committed journey of European economic expansionism.
It was an integral part of the colonising experience that their exploitation of the colonised was better achieved by destroying the vestiges of the latter’s culture and imposing their own in their place. Recreation and sport formed an important component of the foregoing strategy.
The sports practised by the colonisers became, over time, the sports practised by the colonised. That is our historical reality, and is reflected amongst the peoples colonised by the European nations.
The intention of the coloniser was never for us to one day dominate any of the sports practised to the extent that we displayed a higher level of proficiency in any of them than the colonisers or their successors at home and abroad.
It is therefore, part of the debilitating experience of growing up to be British, French, Dutch, Spanish or Portuguese under their respective flags, that our athletes struggled to learn and transform that learning experience into proficiency in the different sports we practised through the ages. Mastery of any of the skill competencies in any or all of the sports practised was at best sporadic. Consistency could also only have been sporadic.
For us in the English-speaking Caribbean, it was not surprising that cricket, ‘the sport of gentlemen’ and athletics, became the ones in which we showed a level of proficiency, relatively early. Unfortunately, our history has been so warped that our political leaders, having replaced the colonisers, have remained so loyal to our sordid colonial experience and its impact on the human psyche, that despite the more internationally acknowledged proficiency of our track and field athletes on the global stage in the early 20th century, it is cricket that they find most acceptable to their palates. This perhaps best explains the blighted conundrum that led to the establishment of a CARICOM Heads of Government Cricket Sub Committee rather than one that addresses sport in all its aspects as they impact the development of our peoples and the geographical space we occupy.
Today, even in the face of internationally celebrated achievements of our Caribbean athletes in track and field athletics, including Usain Bolt’s unique place at the pinnacle of the sprinting world, and the attainment of positions of leadership in international sports federations (IF), our Caribbean leaders and our people, unfortunately, do not yet see the immense potential of our people, in and through sport, and find themselves almost immune to the value others place on them, their work and achievements, globally.
Our Caribbean media, like so many of our institutions in the Caribbean, expend great effort in proving themselves the regional equals of their international counterparts. The norm is the most acerbic of criticisms of efforts at genuine sport development because that is what sells. There is no commitment on the part of the regional sports media to development. The pursuit of profit leads the media’s focus, with secondary emphasis placed on individual journalistic popularity in terms of the capacity to emphasise weaknesses rather than strengths of those who make the sport, the athletes.
Caribbean sport development
Given the foregoing analysis of our region’s sporting history, we can begin to better understand the challenges of developing our athletes.
In a world where sport is a major income-generating exercise, it is not surprising that money, which is often seen as the determination of one’s success in life, dictates human behaviour amongst athletes.
Coaches and agents have quickly learnt the tricks of trade that allows them to ride the backs of the athletes, encouraging them to expend resources on image-building rather than on crafting the dignity of the human person. When an athlete gets defeated the coaches and agents, financially sated, bail out, leaving the once-valued individual athlete to fend for himself, what is needed for the rest of his/her life.
Our governments have yet to engage in the deliberate understanding of sport and what it can do for the peoples of the Caribbean, individually and collectively. They use athletes as political fodder in time and space. They provide facilities but often locate them based on their political currency in elections, not on any other major criteria. The historic reality of political patronage runs rampant in this region, in sport as in virtually all other aspects of social life.
It is therefore a major challenge to persuade the leaders to bring scholarship to bear on scientific research on our sporting history and remarkable poential to create an approach to the growth and development of the industry as a major economic and social pillar.
We must immerse ourselves in continuous research building up storehouses of our findings and creating content on development options for all aspects of sport, especially regarding sustainable development and competition success.
There remains an embarrassijng assumption that talent will always naturally emerge amngst the Caribbean populations and that we do not have to invest in sport-education institutions covering all aspects of this important field of endeavur and development option.
Athletes can be found in every sector of a society – class, race, ethnicity, gender, religion and status. Anyone can aspire to become engaged in the different aspects of sport, one of the fastest growing industries in the world, but they have to be educated an dtrained in institutions that specialise in these areas.
There must be studies on our athletes. We must understand the socialisation processes that continue to impact each of our athletes and analyse how everyone has responded to them, and what they have done to produce the type of individual he/she has become or is in the process of becoming.
We can no longer believe that professional athletes will independently emerge from the bowels of our civilisation, as if by magic, and that they have no social, mental or other needs. We must engage our athletes in continuing education in the holistic sense. We must understand that athletes are truly human and must always be treated as such. They are not mere ‘hewers of wood and drawers of water’.
While it is commonplace for some of our political leaders to trumpet the sporting successes of our athletes as evidence of the advancement of our Caribbean civilisation, all too often they heap the credit upon themselves and their particular ideological orientation. Mention of the others involved are at best decidedly brief, if at all.
Our media must play a major role in the development of our sport industry and not adopt the most cynical of approaches because they see that as the main focus of popular media in the advanced industrial nations of the world. We have an obligation to develop who we are and what we become in a rapidly changing world and our media must be sufficiently innovative to chart their own way of doing things. More attention must be paid to using the media to deliberately develop and consistently enhance our Caribbean culture. Sport is integral to that culture.
