2021 – A year of immense optimism
It is customary for people to make resolutions for the new year. One remains uncertain as to the rationale behind such activities since we are often so fickle that by the end of the first month, January, we would have long forgotten any such commitment.
Some suggest that it is better for us to allow ourselves the opportunity to realistically assess what obtained in the previous year and determine what is possible, achievable, in the following year.
As indicated in the previous Column, dated Wednesday 23 December 2020, the year ending today, has been among the most challenging we would have experienced in our lifetime. Nonetheless, there are those who are of the view that it was also a year of opportunity for those who insist that we should never allow ourselves to be defeated by whatever emerges in life.
In a sense, the COVID-19 pandemic forces us to determine whether we wish to see the glass as half full or half empty. For some, alas, all too few, the preference is for it to be considered rather optimistically, as half full, replete with potential; replete with opportunity.
Sport psychology
There is a very strong belief among an increasing number of sports personnel that the single biggest problem confronting sport in the Caribbean and especially in St Vincent and the Grenadines is that of our lack of mental preparedness.
It is unfortunate that once we make mention of mental preparedness or lack thereof, many begin to think of people not being mentally stable and this equates being on the road to madness. Nothing could be farther from the truth.
Many of our sport administrators, coaches and technical officials fail to take sport psychology seriously.
Administrators do not appear to take enough of an interest in knowing the people involved in the sport, from athletes to technical officials to fellow administrators. If sports personnel are ill-prepared, psychologically, then nothing can really develop meaningfully.
Internationally, the successful organisations all include expertise in the field of psychologically. This is due to the important role that the mental component plays in an individual’s life, regardless of official qualification and training.
If we were to take the case of any sport practised in St Vincent and the Grenadines, for example, we can readily understand the absence of mental preparedness amongst our cricketers.
What does the average coach know about those come forward to play the game?
What are their respective family backgrounds?
What are their academic levels?
What are their life circumstances, including eating, study and sleeping patterns?
What are their emotional statuses?
What are their ambitions?
What are their motivations for getting into the sport?
In other words, it is important for the coach and the administrators of a sport to have an understanding of the individual athlete that comes to their sport.
In long term athlete development, it is important to understand that the average athlete does not always have perfect alignment of chronological age with training age with level of maturity. It is when these are appropriately aligned that success is possible.
Experienced coaches advocate that it takes between six to eight years to bring an athlete through to elite status. Unfortunately, in St Vincent and the Grenadines, we adopt the Nescafe model, ‘add hot water and stir’. This latter approach leads to early athlete ‘burnout’ as the coach tries to render the impossible possible.
Telling the real stories
One of the problems confronting sport at the global level, including the Caribbean, is the consistent failure to adequately record the true stories of our athletes. Admittedly, this is a global problem, in large measure due to the fact that given our anxiety to make heroes of those athletes who do well, we deliberately hide the nasty aspect from others so that we get a sort of incredible fairy tale instead of harsh reality or the genuinely human side of the individual.
Alternatively, some take pleasure in investigating the gory details of a potential hero in a deliberate attempt to ridicule and dismiss the efforts of the athlete to overcome the odds and make something of himself.
There is much merit in telling the true story of an individual athlete, coach, technical official or sport administrator. There is so much we can learn from these revelations.
While, for example, it took a very long time for the truth to emerge about Lance Armstrong, we have nonetheless learnt of the immense pressure that can overcome an individual in pursuit of the glory and wealth to be gained from success.
No one is ever anxious to acknowledge the extent to which our decidedly skewed societal value system leads individual members to extreme levels of dishonesty in order to attain the accolades, admiration and wealth attendant to success. At best, we are only too willing to take it all for granted.
Lance Armstrong created a story of himself that at once earned him sympathy as a ‘cancer case’ and also as someone who used his fight against the illness as international evidence of how such a situation can readily be transformed into global success. The world bought into this colossal falsehood because it was packaged as something they could all relate to.
Lance became an international sporting hero based on a carefully crafted lie.
The revelation of the startling truth have wrought immeasurable damage to millions around the world, some of whom may never quite recover.
Witness too, the several decades of the act of cheating that Maradona perpetrated in the Football World Cup semi-final. He never recanted. He died never admitting that he cheated. Indeed, he insisted that it was not cheating.
He corralled his fellow players on the field of play at the time and encouraged them to celebrate this deliberate act of cheating and later sold it rather dishonestly as ‘the hand of God’. Our demented value system allowed Maradona to become one of the most celebrated footballers of all time, ignoring his twisting of Christianity.
Maradona was a gifted player, much like Armstrong, but at least the latter reached the point of confessing his truth whilst Maradona died while remaining committed to his lie.
The legendary Carl Lewis, is still celebrated, unfortunately by sport leaders who should know better today. He was on performance enhancing drugs even as Ben Johnson, also on drugs, defeated him at the Seoul Olympics’ 100m finals in 1988. It was several years later that he admitted to his cheating but noted, ‘everybody was doing it’.
The truth of how an athlete makes it from humble beginnings to elite status is not always told because it is much easier toile.
Good examples are hard to find.
We have been consistently deluded into believing that success in sport could only emerge from cheating in one form or another.
Sport Collaboration
St Vincent and the Grenadines is part of global society. Our sport athletes, coaches, technical officials and administrators are exposed to the same pressures as their counterparts in the rest of the world. Of importance therefore is the choices they choose to make in going forward.
2021 offers our athletes, coaches, technical officials and administrators opportunities for a new beginning.
The suggestion is that we can start all over ag ain but having committed to collaborating with one another in genuine honesty, working in the collective best interest of St Vincent and the Grenadines.
Instead of our national sports associations competing with each other we should be working collectively to develop sport in the nation.
We must come to the full recognition that we are all from a nation with a small, open and highly vulnerable economy. This alone should motivate us to share our limited resources in every aspect.
What, for example, prevents the football federation from having one set of the stadium lights to which it has access, located at the stadium at Diamond? The facility can serve athletics, football and rugby and the lights will assist in facilitating its enhancement and usage through to the international level.
It is possible that our coaches in the different sporting disciplines can come together to forge a coaches development strategy that allows them to learn from each other as well as to engage in research that could facilitate the emergence of novel ways to develop Vincentian athletes of world standard.
The achievements of athletes elsewhere in the world have been proven possible by Jamaicans and Trinidadians in athletics and football and netball. This could be done here as much as anywhere else.
The several national sports associations could use 2021 as a point of departure to the crafting of a national programme of collaboration that allows the blending of ideas to enhance sport in the nation. There is so much that they can learn from each other.
Importantly, our national sports associations can encourage students at the secondary and tertiary levels to engage in research on sport in St Vincent and the Grenadines for their assignments, upon which successive generations can build, to enrich our future sports personnel in all aspects of an already rapidly-increasing slew of career options.
We are much more than a resilient people. We have the intellectual and creative capacity to match peoples all across the globe, in just about any field of endeavour.
The legendary achievements of Elma Francois, Shake Keane, Frankie McIntosh, Edgar Julien Duncan and Adonal Foyle, cannot be the end of who this country can produce as its major contributors to global development. There are many as yet unborn.
2021 offers us all, as Vincentians, an excellent opportunity to rise above the numerous global challenges and point creative avenues and strategies for our people, through sport.
Sport is an important part of national development. Let us grasp it firmly with both hands and shape the nation’s future.
