CAN SPORT LIVE UP TO ITS BILLING – PART 2
In my previous Column dated Friday 25 September 2026, we addressed some of the issues in sport, seeking to jog the thoughts of those who have been in sport at different levels and who have been committed to the lofty ideals attendant to the promotion of sport in society.
Whilst many still believe that sport should have a positive impact on society, rapidly changing global society is creating major challenges to this belief, wreaking havoc in sporting organisations and indeed radically impacting what was once thought to be normative.
Some may recall that botched programme under the former government here at home that was labelled, Sport Against Crime. Throughout the government’s touting of the programme, many involved in sport never quite understood the concept nor the intent. It may have had more political intent than anything else and therefore never reached a point where any actions taken under its ambit would have been formally evaluated.
Sport Against Crime in St Vincent and the Grenadines was a rather hollow political charade.
St Vincent and the Grenadines has had several instances of criminal violence taking the lives of sportspeople.
The fact is that sport can play a role in helping society to address crime in its midst but it must never become a political football.
One of the problems is that politicians have become adept at promoting themselves and their own ideas that they mistake the leaves for the forest and fail miserably to address the causes of crime, if only because those that they have identified often lack credibility. Too often our politicians fall well short of being good role models for the nation’s children, even though they may think otherwise.
In the previous Column, we addressed the value of sport as promoted across the globe, dating back to antiquity. Numerous organisations have emerged with the intention of working in and through sport to create a better world. We have institutions that commit working through sport for development and peace, others address the issue of human rights, gender equity, among others.
There remains a belief that sport can be offered to children at an early age, a viable lifelong option, a career path and a means of becoming whole persons. However, we do not live in a bubble, hidden away from the realities that constitute life, in any historical epoch.
Mankind has repeatedly revealed itself very capable of self-destruction, and not necessarily by accident.
We are products of the respective societies in which we have been socialised and change is inevitable if only because circumstances do. Bad habits somehow seem much easier to take hold of individuals as opposed to good ones.
We fail society when we seem to believe that the only route to effect change is through brute force and the persistent crafting of a multiplicity of laws, the more draconian the better.
In the Caribbean, our penal institutions, especially those intended for rehabilitating juveniles, consistently fail to do much more that encourage criminal careers and recidivism.
Where care in not taken, sport may well prove to be part of the problem rather than of the resolutions societies need.
The Gambling House is in your hands
It was only a few years ago that the International Olympic Committee headlined its war against doping in sport and illegal gambling. Today, we hear of the promotion in several quarters of ‘Enhanced Games’ an opportunity, they claim, to see the full extent of human sporting capability when supported by the use of performance enhancing drugs.
Often playing the role of a champion of global sport, the IOC facilitated the establishment of the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA), to oversee the prevalence of ‘clean sport’. The agency still exists and despite its indefatigable efforts, remains troubled by the persistence of those willing to risk their careers and lives in the fast-track pursuit of success at all costs.
In 2016, however, there appeared something of a spat between then head of WADA, Sir Craig Reedie, and the leadership of the IOC. While many were unable to determine the precise cause of the spat, many seemed willing to admit that it did eventually lead to the International Testing Agency (ITA) being formed. So, the cost of overseeing the global fight against the use of performance enhancing drugs and methods in sport has expanded significantly. Nonetheless, the cheats still abound in and around sport. One group is insistent on outmanoeuvring the system while the other is intent on catching them. It is like a disgusting merry-go-round.
Sport is big business and there has been extensive expansion of the industry over the past several years with some of the wealthiest people turning their attention and finances to it. A review of the rise of professional sport in the USA provides some of the finest examples of the changes that have impacted. But the phenomenon is global.
We have witnessed the rise of the Indian Premier League (IPL) and its comprehensive transformation of the sport of cricket. The meteoric transformation of the sport in terms of revenue generation and mass appeal on an ever-widening range of scenarios has not been lost on the IOC. The sport is now on the competition programme of the Summer Olympics in Los Angeles scheduled for 2028 and most likely, again, in Brisbane, Australia in 2032. As is the case with almost all of the professional sports in the USA and increasingly, around the world, legal gambling is playing a major role in the sport of cricket.
Today, we are witnessing an amazingly unprecedented surge in ‘legal’ gambling across the international sporting community that allows those engaged to use their cell phones to make bets on all aspects of any sporting event, anywhere in the world.
The reality is that gambling is now so readily accessible in a world that is changing at warp speed in every aspect.
There have already been cases where players have been implicated in gambling on competitions in which they are directly involved.
The plethora of legal online gambling institutions continue to grow exponentially, creating new generations of gamblers, many of whom care little about the deleterious consequences lurking therein.
The marketing gurus, interested only in increased income have shown little concern for the historical evidence of the several ways in which gambling has destroyed individuals and whole families. The relationship between gambling and crime has also been historically recorded and the consequences have always been dire.
Confronting crime
Over the past several years developing countries, already struggling with their economies have experienced the growth and expansion of criminal activity. Some eagerly suggest that it is to be expected and therefore accepted that a developing country would have increases in crime as they ‘develop’. They argue that crime is an actual feature of development.
Developing countries such as those in the Caribbean have failed to adequately address the expansion of criminal activity within their own borders. Much of this failure stems from the unwillingness of politicians, initially, to systematically analyse the beginnings of crime in their societies. Rather than engage the appropriate expertise they readily apply their instinctive response of ‘’treating fire with fire’, only to watch crime rise to unprecedented levels. Many of our countries are now crime-ridden institutions. The politicians who did nothing scientific are now screaming from their Cabinets and Parliaments, still refusing to acknowledge their own intransigence and the role it has played in the realisation of the current reality.
Sport today
Let’s return to sport and its potential for human development, unity and peace.
The foundation of sport is play, people having fun together. The idea is that of an exchange and a challenge that is at once social, engaging each other physically and mentally. Participation is, at least in the beginning, the most important feature. Unfortunately, it is only in the most remote areas of the world and in the Special Olympics, that this is still the main focus.
Life has changed us as people so much that sport has become as competitive as wars, only without the weapons. Today, the main motive is to win. Unfortunately, for some, this is winning at all cost, whether to oneself or the other competitors. History has revealed that this social transformation to competition has transformed sport to be the representation, not only of families, schools, communities, clubs and nations, but the arena of battle for honours, recognition, status, wealth and power.
One is taken back to the film that starred James Kaahn, Rollerball. The introduction of the film was a declaration that wars will no longer exist but that in the future there will be Rollerball. It was the heralding of a new era in global achievement.
Few may recall the aforementioned film but it has proven to be incredibly prophetic. Nations have, over the past few years, been transforming sport competition arenas into social, economic and political battlefields. The more sport has been professionalised the more it falls prey to the comprehensive rejection of traditional values and eager adoption of selfishness, egoism, greed and graft. Winning is all that is important because of what it means in terms of the fundamentals of living comfortable lives – financial rewards.
There are challenges everywhere.
In St Lucia, there is national discourse on the decision of the country’s lone Olympic medallist to opt out of representing the country at the Commonwealth Games in Glasgow, Scotland, earlier this year. People have aligned based on the conflict between tradition and current value systems. It is not a matter of who is right and who is wrong. It is about being realistic about how decisions are made in today’s world, given the incredibly strong social forces impacting every individual.
Sport and Crime
Without meticulous analysis of sport in the global changing context, it is not possible to be able to determine whether or not sport can play a major role in any society, and that includes crime.
Crime, like sport, is a social construct. Laws are social constructs, as are beliefs, values and norms. We ignore these facts to our eternal peril.
It is therefore important that in any society, we bring together people with the requisite education, training, expertise and experience to research the causes of crime in their midst through time. They must then discuss ways in which they can create mechanisms to directly and indirectly get at the root causes. There must be a concerted effort and monitoring and evaluation of impact and responsiveness to the new strategies, always involving all stakeholders.
The old approach to policing crime has gone out of style and relevance. Those who hanker back to the days of raw penal punishment as the panacea for crime will continue to embarrassingly fail.
Similarly, the stakeholders of sport who ignore the fundamentals of socialisation and the importance of integrating this into their sport development strategies and programmes will inevitably fail.
To effectively facilitate sport as a social mechanism to impact the battle against crime in any society, we must engage students of sociology, criminology, social psychology, psychology and psychiatry and engage them in social research and social engineering.
Conclusion
We can look back, now, after several years of ‘ole talk’ about: an education revolution, pan against crime and sport against crime and conclude that they were failed projects from conception. They were fandangled ideas of a political elite unwilling to open themselves to analysing the reality in which they existed and which had gone well beyond them.
Today’s Vincentian society still has an opportunity to use sport to save our society from itself. Let ius all grasp it with both hands.
