Inaugural Caribbean Games on course
In a previous article, we addressed the matter of the odds that have been stacked against the hosting of the Inaugural Caribbean Games. There is little doubt that the fact that the Games will finally take place in Guadeloupe is momentous and historic on many different fronts and there is reason to be proud of what the Guadeloupeans have done and are doing to ensure that the Games are realised.
As Caribbean people we often forget our history. Even when we do choose to remember our history we often approach it from the vantage point of the consequences of the conquest and colonisation that we have experienced through the centuries. In the process, we focus on all of the negatives and ignore our achievements in the face of often unspeakable odds.
This Columnist is of the view that we can see our history in a positive light. We can attest to the fact that the countess of our predecessors did not allow themselves to be beaten into submission, weakly and meekly surrendering everything to those who denied us our very humanity.
The reality reveals that not all of our predecessors who were enslaved surrendered. We choose to remember those who stood up and fight for their dignity and for the successive generations that would inevitably follow.
Caribbean history is as much a struggle for human rights at every turn, as anything else. If we adopt this stance then we would recognise the extent to which that struggle continues today, where the contemporary colonisers remain the monied interest groupings, still small in number yet significantly powerful; the politicians that allow themselves to ‘speak with forked tongue’ to an electorate that they wish to keep on the fringes of literacy and forever mendicant; the religious leaders who refuse to understand, adopt and implement the Christian mandate as enunciated by Jesus’ reading of the scroll in the synagogue as he began his public life; the influencers who insist on the promotion of false values and who, in their pursuit of greater recognition and heftier coffers, sing the praises of a twisted ideology bereft of genuine love and care; those who prey on our children, male and female, in an exploitative sojourn of human decadence.
In contemporary we are not short of exploiters. We are, however, woefully short of those who are genuinely committed to the struggle for liberation of the mind and an end to exploitation of any sort.
What does all of the aforementioned have to do with our story of the Inaugural Caribbean Games, you may ask? The answer is that they have everything to do with it.
Historiography
There is a belief that sport has the capacity to help the otherwise helpless thrive in a struggle to showcase that they can achieve success against the odds.
Success begets success. Success emboldens the successful.
In many respects, success in sport ennobles the athlete, because it is an enabler. Success in sport is an affirmation that man is capable of using different means to attain victory, defying the blighted existence to which the people were once constrained as fodder for the wealthy and powerful.
Success in sport imbues in the successful athlete an understanding that power does not only reside in the achievement of the wealth that has always been the objective of the exploiter, the oppressive classes; does not only reside in those of the lighter hue nor those of the self-aggrandised ethnic groupings.
CANOC’s push to establish the Caribbean Games is itself an exercise in the struggles of our people for genuine independence, not the paper variety that leaves is celebrating annually with half-baked military and paramilitary displays and senseless speeches that are at best hubristic expressions of fanciful political king tots.
Between 1957 and 1965 the Caribbean organised the British West Indies Championships in athletics. Unfortunately, it is to this event, Athletics only, that many often refer to as the region’s attempt at hosting the Caribbean Games. Clearly, that is not the case.
The advances made by the Caribbean’s athletes in the sport of track and field athletics, admittedly, may well have begun with those from our region who travelled to the United Kingdom, for a variety of reasons. The likes of Arthur Wint, Jamaica’s first Olympic gold medallist in London in 1948, in the 400m, was in the Royal Air Force. Trinidad and Tobago’s MacDonald Bailey first represented the United Kingdom rather than his native Trinidad and Tobago, something that led to him being the object of much derision for many years, even when he returned home to live.
The Southern Games, organised by the TEXACO Sports Club based at the Guaracara Park in Marabella, South Trinidad, served as the main athletics and cycling combined competition in the Caribbean, for many years. Some considered the sporting spectacle the ‘Olympics’ of the Caribbean. The sponsor, TEXACO, facilitated attendance by some of the best athletes and cyclists in the world, all competing on grass. Olympic gold and silver medallists were commonplace.
The foregoing stories reflect a constant yearning for something of a Caribbean Games.
When in 1958, the Caribbean politicians finally agreed the establishment of the West Indian Federation, the International Olympic Committee, in recognition of the political union, albeit experimental in nature, readily approved membership among its ranks, the West Indian Olympic Committee. The regional organisation had good representation at the Pan American Games in Chicago in 1958 and again at the Rome Olympics of 1960.
Briefly, the long-held dream of a Caribbean Games seemed, not just plausible, but excitingly possible.
The short-lived nature of the Federation soon led, in 1962, to Jamaica and Trinidad and Tobago going Independent and hence the official end of the regional Olympic Committee. For many, the dream of a Caribbean Games receded with much dispatch.
The Caribbean had once more descended into the morass of the historic decadence of the legacy of conquest, slavery, and colonialism. The political leadership of the day, and perhaps of the era, fell prey to their own delusions and hubristic ambitions and ignored the immense potential that the coming together of small islands, each possessive of open and highly vulnerable economies, had for building a new vision and mission.
The athletes who had given the peoples of the Caribbean so much hope in athletics and later, in cricket, were perceived as little more than entertainers, to be used by the political elite of the region to suggest to the developed world that despite everything done to us by conquest slavery and colonialism, we have some talent.
Thankfully, the likes of Learie Constantine and CLR James used cricket in the United Kingdom to rally West Indians living in that Diaspora, to wage an incessant struggle for meaningful change. They somehow thought that Independence was the catalyst for achieving that objective.
The Caribbean Games
The successes of Caribbean athletes in several different sports never allowed the fore that was the dream for a Caribbean Games that would enable our own people to witness, first hand, the talent they possess, to wane.
In the late 1990s, the National Olympic Committees (NOC) of the Caribbean came together and formed the Caribbean Caucus of National Olympic Committees (CCNOC). In 2003, the CCNOC had morphed into the Caribbean Association of National Olympic Committees (CANOC), whose primary mandate, at the time, was to establish the Caribbean Games.
The commitment of the leaders of the regional Olympic body to achieve its primary objective pitted it against the ‘divide and rule’ legacy of the colonial past of the Caribbean. They did not relent. They did not yield.
In 2006, plans were laid for Trinidad and Tobago’s Olympic Committee to host the Inaugural Caribbean Games. There was much enthusiasm, from Guyana and Surinam in the South to Cuba in the North West.
Alas! With great hesitancy on the part of the then Prime Minister, Patrick Manning, to openly voice support for the Games and the onset of the H1N1 virus, the Games were cancelled one week before its scheduled start.
The embarrassment, chagrin, anger, and outrage that followed did not dampen the indomitable spirit of the majority of CANOC’s members.
Seven years later, in 2016, a CANOC Associate Member, the Olympic and Sport Organisation of Guadeloupe (CROSGUA, led by Alain Soreze, raised his hand, offering his organisation and island as host of the Inaugural Caribbean Games in 2021.
In 2020, the entire world reeled under the trauma of another virus, more global, and significantly more deadly than anything previously experienced, threatened the realisation of the Games, yet again.
The leadership of CROSGUA nonetheless stood firm, holding fast to the strong, and positively healthy legacy of the Caribbean sportspeople, and asked, not for the cancellation of the Inaugural Caribbean Games, but rather, its postponement to June-July 2022.
There have been immense challenges thrown in the path of CROSGUA and CANOC as they collectively confirmed their commitment to the Games.
The weakened economic realities of the CANOC member countries, the inconsistency of some of the leaders in Guadeloupe, the flip-flopping of some regional and international organisations, all seemed to recede into the lengthy shadows of time, the face of the strongest show of unity in the history of CANOC itself.
All of CANOC, all of its Associate Members, stood shoulder to shoulder, firm in their individual and collective resolve that the Caribbean Games are our Games; that the Games must go on, ‘against all odds’.
In Guadeloupe, the sport-loving people have endorsed and embraced the Games because they have come to an understanding of its growing significance as a symbol of the indomitable spirit of the peoples of the Caribbean. They have come to see the Caribbean Games, its inaugural edition, as a bastion of all that is good, pure, dignified and uplifting for a once downtrodden people.
For all of the members of CANOC, the Inaugural Caribbean Games, scheduled for 29 June – 3 July, 2022, whatever its final outcome in terms of performances, will forever stand in testimony of a legacy that can never be taken away from us, the peoples of the Caribbean.
The Inaugural Caribbean Games reflect the comprehensive rejection of all efforts at denying us our dignity and nobility.
The Inaugural Caribbean Games belong to the Caribbean people, standing proud on the podium of a change that will impact future generations, as yet unborn.
