Making Size work for Sport in SVG
There is an old adage that goes, ‘Size Matters’.
A former economics lecturer at the University of the West Indies, Trevor Farrell, often articulated the point that these small islands that dot the Caribbean Sea may not have been intended for human habitation.
At the time of his pronouncement, some may have thought that Farrell was either being facetious or was amongst those considered more than a little bit ‘looney’.
Today, in hindsight, an increasing number of our Caribbean people are at a stage of acknowledging just how profound Farrell’s analysis was at the time.
Size does indeed matter.
One would have thought that being small, many of our Caribbean countries would have found it much easier to have the entire population agree on the importance of working together, in unison, in the collective best interest. Instead, what the likes of St Vincent and the Grenadines and others have shown, is that bringing our people together is a monumental task, almost impossible to accomplish.
We have grown to appreciate the consequences of hubris amongst those who achieve political success as well as those who have, by whatever means, have attained economic success.
Insularity has become an integral component of the Caribbean lexicon, almost compelling us to accept that we will, perhaps, never come together in our collective best interest.
The failure of the West Indies Federation (1958 – 1962) serves as an embarrassment to all of what constitutes politics in the Caribbean region. Douglas Hall reminds us that the failure falls squarely on the shoulders of the political leaders who sought to establish the institution while ignoring their respective populations. In other words, the leaders saw themselves as presuming that since they were elected to lead the masses have no role in determining their future.
Decades later, nothing has changed.
Our politicians across the small Caribbean islands remain petty in respect of who is marginally larger than whom. This is how trivial they have been and continue to be.
But we can, as a people, do significantly better.
The claim that unity is strength may be a truism but the Caribbean is yet to prove that this is the case in our geographical space.
We seem to act as though being small nations, we have no choice but to ape more than imitate and grovel for our entire lives, suffering under one benevolent dictator after another.
What is still possible!!!
Some of us believe that it is possible for us to break the stranglehold of the experiences of conquest, slavery, colonialism and paper independence and forge a Caribbean that works for its peoples.
Demystifying politics
We must begin the way to genuine liberation by demystifying politics.
We must find creative ways of making the average child, parent, teacher, pastor, understand that life is inherently political because it is all about making decisions; about who gets what and how what is obtained is used in society.
Given the aforementioned stance, sport is as much inherently political as any and every other aspect of life in society.
Once we are of the foregoing understanding, only then is it possible for us to take the next step of full engagement in social life, through sport.
The stakeholders in sport are best equipped to inform the nation that each of them possesses the right to make an input into what becomes sport, in our respective schools, communities and nations.
We must begin the process that reverses the status quo. Instead of allowing international sports federations and global multi-sport institutions to operate as the plantation owners of old, we must ensure that we, at the grassroot level, can foster appropriate pathways that ultimately accord the international sports bodies their reason for being in existence.
It is an amazing reality that Caribbean sports organisations, having experienced conquest through to paper independence and, most recently, paper republicanism, continue to allow themselves to be dictated to by international ‘governing’ bodies that have no respect for them and consider them inly important in making up numbers.
One has only to review the claims by the aforementioned international sports institutions that they have the n umbers in terms of membership and that somehow, in and of itself, guarantees them some ‘near-divine right’ to dictate to the rest of the world.
Decision-making at the level of international sports organisations is decidedly more obtuse, caustic and pathetically prejudicial than local politics.
Under the cover of sport, international sports institutions clothe their invectively biased decision-making processes under values that they have created and imposed with the firmest of wills, on everyone else.
The demystification of the political process in international sports remains critical for the future of sport.
Small nations must seize the moment to locate themselves in the midst of this process, challenging the status quo and insisting on their critical role in effective fundamental change.
Caribbean politicians have failed the entire region. Lacking creative vision, they helped themselves to arguing for the mere replacement of the colonial leaders with peoples of the Caribbean who best exemplified the class/colour/status realities of their former ‘masters’.
The end result is the same divisive chaos that the colonials created. We have always found ways of maintaining the decadent status quo and patting ourselves on the back for having so readily achieved this., without fear of contradiction.
Demystifying the politics would inevitably lead to eagerness on the part of the populace to participate in the decision-making process. Knowing their worth, the masses feel empowered to contribute. They bring their competencies to bear on the goals that they have been a part of establishing in the first place.
Advantages from being small
Small countries are often composed of smaller communities in which everyone knows everyone else. Rather than allow insularity to take root they can readily acknowledge their interdependence as a feature of survival and hasten to share themselves in collective endeavour.
Individual pride can, more readily, be transformed into community pride and, ultimately, national pride.
In small communities in the Caribbean, historically, unity is a notable feature amongst the peoples. The achievements of the members of the community are immediately, inextricably linked to a strong sense of belonging to the collective. This, whether is academics or sport. We experience this whenever a Caribbean athlete mounts the competition podium.
Whenever Bolt took to the track, all of Jamaica did likewise. It is why crime dropped on the occasions of his performances. The collective was too caught up in his representation of all that they stood for.
We may recall too, that when Trinidad and Tobago was playing the USA, in a football match that determined whether or not they would have made the 1990 World Cup, the peoples of the Caribbean became the people of the twin-island Republic and vice versa.
To the international community, it was all about the peoples of the Caribbean finally getting to a Football World Cup Finals. It was the same when Jamaica qualified, a few years later, for the Finals.
Making size work in the Caribbean
In the recent past, in the sport of athletics, we have seen the offering of opportunities to athletes from across the Caribbean to study and train in Jamaica, the region’s leading athletics nation. This has been long in coming. It has emerged after Jamaica played host to a High Performance Training Centre of the international federation, for sprints and hurdles.
Today, for example, several Caribbean athletes are studying at Jamaican secondary and tertiary educational institutions, while training through to the elite level in the sport. This reflects one of the major benefits of being small. Scarce resources and expertise can readily be shared, enabling growth amongst the grouping of small island nations.
Jamaica, possessive of a culture of sport, allows for an expansion of the development options for an ever-increasing number of athletes of the Caribbean.
The University of the West Indies (UWI) has started a Faculty of Sport to serve the Caribbean. This will eventually give rise to a broad-based foundation for the sports practised in the region, ultimately, leading to a standard of excellence that the international community will be unable to ignore.
There is great value in being small, if only we are ever mindful of our immense talent base and the potential that resides in our people.
There are those who lament the fact that we so often seem to under-perform and accept mediocrity as normative. They diminish our achievements suggesting that it is the exception rather than the norm. But this is not who we can be. It ought not to be accepted as who we are.
Just as the Caribbean has produced nobel laureates so too we have produced world renowned track and field athletes, boxers, swimmers, cyclists, cricketers and footballers. While we in the region have taken the achievers for granted, for the most part, their achievements have not been lost on those who, through their unquenchable greed once conquered and plundered us. They are still at a stage where they deem us their minions.
There is much that sport can teach us all about ourselves and the range of possibilities if we work together in the best interest of the collective.
We are all too eager to pounce on each other, victims of the separation wrought by water
Unfortunately, our political leaders have missed the boat, thinking only of their own places in the perversion of history.
The collaboration now taking place in athletics with Jamaica and latterly, with UWI, could usher in a new realisation of the value of size in harnessing the limited resources at our disposal to rouse our peoples from the slumber of chronic despondency, an annoying legacy of slavery.
