Keeping Our Sport Alive

Dear Friends

We are now in the month of May 2020. This would have been the month in which we celebrate the annual TASVG Wendell Hercules Open Championships and  acknowledge the importance of our sport to the holistic development of Vincentian youth. Instead, we are suffering under the world’s most recent plague, the COVID-19 pandemic, that has forced us all to re-think on who we are and what we are about.

Team Athletics St Vincent and the Grenadines (TASVG) is in constant contact with our athletes in Jamaica, those at the Jamaica College and the others at the GC Foster School of Physical Education and Sport. Senior athlete, McKish Compton, has been asked to be our chief liaison and has been coordinating the relations between all of our athletes and informing TASVG. He is also in touch with SVG’s Consular Officer, Ms Pam Barbour, regarding arrangements for a possible flight to have the Vincentian students, athletes included, brought home at the conclusion of the current academic semester.

Senior athlete, Kineke Alexander, based at a training camp in Florida, continues to be TASVG’s prime liaison with our athletes studying and training in the USA and has been constantly updating the executive.

TASVG welcomes the return of Adonson ‘Bigs’ Shallow to training. He had long been side-lined by injury and had to undergo surgery. He has been in touch with TASVG as has been several of our other athletes, including DeLhonni Nicol-Samuel, Jummone Exeter, Kimorie Shearman, Brandon Valentine-Parris, Darria Matthias and Shafiqua Maloney.

While the COVID-19 has put the brakes on many of the planned competitions around the world, we are heartened by the continued commitment of our coaches to their respective athletes, keeping them appropriately informed and in training.

We have kept our coaches active, educationally, by having them link with World Athletics, the International Olympic Committee and the Panam Sports Channel, where a variety of offers are available for their edification.

With the postponement of the Tokyo Olympics we are hopeful that our athletes would seize the opportunity afforded them to make the qualifying standards, thereby enabling SVG to have qualified athletes at the event as opposed to mere universality places.

TASVG continues its appeal to all our stakeholders to heed the advice of our medical fraternity and adhere to the established protocols aimed at enhancing our capacity to defeat COVID-19.