Another Missed Opportunity Looms
St Vincent and the Grenadines, like the other Caribbean countries that have been fortunate enough to be selected to host matches in the pending T20 Cricket World Cup, later this year, seems set to experience yet another missed opportunity because of its persistent failure to systematically craft and implement a Sport Tourism Policy.
In a country inundated with political promises and ‘ole talk’ it is easy to understand why, despite the bravado and proclamations of ‘how much we are doing for sport’, the announcement that the Caribbean was going to host the T20 Cricket World Cup has made no difference to the approach of the government beyond the usual prattling.
As has become the norm, we are about to engage in another round of expenditure on the sporting infrastructure of the nation but in a manner that very much appears to be consistent with the now normative absence of any sort of creativity and scientific planning. None of this should. Instead, it reinforces the pathetic nature of what is supposed to pass as governance.
Politicians are about winning general elections and most of them display a strong tendency to the edict of ‘winning at all cost’ regardless of the consequences for their respective constituencies and the nation at large. Small wonder then that the practice of sport and indeed living in societies have become saddeningly competitive, heavily divisive and incredibly despicable.
In St Vincent and the Grenadines, like most of the Caribbean, sport receives much mention but little attention.
Sport Economics
Over the past several years the world has witnessed an almost untrammelled growth in sport and with it, amazing revenues generated everywhere.
Many countries encourage investment in sport because of the latter’s capacity to make significant contributions to their respective national economies.
Sport has spawned enterprises small, medium and large in different parts of the world, making such investments not just worthwhile but decidedly profitable.
Sport’s revenue generation trends have positively impacted the individual players, their families, colleges, clubs, communities and entire societies.
Sport economics has now become an important discipline in its own right, rather than a mere adjunct of something else.
Despite the impact of sport on economies we are witnessing across the world, Caribbean governments are yet to take the obvious benefits of sport seriously enough to go beyond using it as a token with which to continue ‘playing’ the electorate for victory at the general elections. This reality has not served the Caribbean well.
Good examples abound and so too, scholarly, investigative studies on sport economics, but many of our people, involved in sport do not take the time to engage in reading, understanding and working with and through sport to arrive at a genuinely development pathway to success, on and off the field of play.
We have learnt, all too quickly, the many shortcuts in sport. We have watched administrators engage themselves in crafty strategies for the ‘advancement’ of sport, which essentially translated into their personal advancement at the expense of other stakeholders.
Many coaches readily took shortcuts ‘for and on behalf their athletes’, doing everything for them to win, ultimately rendering the same athletes new-found sport junkies, falsely claiming success and having difficulty living with themselves.
Lance Armstrong, once the doyen of international road cycling, today finds himself seemingly seeking remorse and forgiveness after years of misleading himself, the sport, sponsors and countless adoring fans. Sport journalists, anxious to create ‘sport heroes and heroines’ shamelessly ignore their contributions to the ‘fame’ of Armstrong and others like him, and eagerly pursue ‘the next big find’.
The economics of sport, much like all other aspects of economics, is inundated with the same vagaries. There is good and there is bad. The choice is to be made by the practitioners. Unfortunately, the promise of immeasurable enrichment impacts the outcomes we come to know.
Sport Tourism and CWC2007
17 years ago, Caribbean governments of the day exposed at once, their barrenness in respect of what constitutes sport tourism, and their own yearning for economic success to showcase their blighted overrating of their political egos. One by one, they joined the ill-conceived measures that readily moved the sport out of the hands of the hands of the people who were once their counterparts in the ‘psychological liberating exercise’ that unfolded Independence.
Families and children were treated as ‘chaff’, forced to rid their traditions of making attendance at cricket matches a fun-filled, entertaining exercise in popular camaraderie. Exclusive rights became the order of the day as authorised persons snatched anything that could be consumed. The outcome was people choosing to stay away from matches and a grand ‘bust’ for the owners and their minions.
Today, 17 years after CWC2007, once-avid patrons of the sport in the Caribbean are yet to receive a comprehensive report on the enterprise.
CWC2007 was no genuine sport tourism exercise. It was an adventure that paid no attention to the fundamentals of sport tourism. The people, the consumers, were treated as the enemies of the enterprise.
All the traditional Caribbean entertainment components were sucked out of CWC2007. The anticipated increase in visitor arrivals never materialised and the matches lacked the interest and appeal that were expected.
By the time the owners of the endeavour realised their abject failure they panicked; sought a trumped-up reversal. But the fire in the bellies of the Caribbean cricket traditionalists had already been quenched by their disappointment and could not be re-kindled.
Sport Tourism in the Caribbean today
While many governments speak of their interest in sport tourism, especially at budget time, they continue to fall short of constructing appropriate policies. They put their own glorification and egos ahead of finding the right mix of qualified expertise to lead the process; the change in approach that is needed.
Actually, there are some countries in the Caribbean that are doing well in tourism but have not yet grasped what sport tourism is and how it can become a major pillar of their nations’ economies. This may well explain the absence of any carefully crafter national sport tourism policy in the region.
Caribbean countries, despite all the discussions about CARICOM, are in direction competition with e ach other, to the detriment of the Caribbean people.
Caribbean leaders reflect almost total ignorance of the concept of ‘team’ and the benefits that are inherently resident in teamwork. They reveal to their own people a sort of sycophancy that thrives on ‘doing better’ that the others and encourage them to adopt this approach as consistent with nationalism. This explains why Federation failed as well as the immobility evidenced by CARICOM and the OECS Secretariat, our regional institutions.
Caribbean sport organisations are also partly to blame for the absence of a clearly delineated sport tourism policy in and for the Caribbean. All too often, these organisations are plagued by the same psychological malady resident in the region’s political leadership.
The Bahamas is one of the Caribbean’s leaders in offering sport excellent opportunities to help foster sport tourism. Unfortunately, there appears much that is lost in the messaging and certainly in the absence of appropriate research that could provide evidence of the extensive range of sport economics’ opportunities.
Caribbean sporting organisations are often found woefully deficient in the area of research and development. This is as true in sport performance as it is in the rapidly expanding areas of sport and sport careers.
Sporting organisations do no engage sufficiently in collaboration with health, nutrition, psychology, economic planning, agriculture and broader national culture. We lack innovation. We see creativity in a very limited sense and engage in it from that vantage point.
Opportunity 2024
We are into the first month of 2024. Here in St Vincent and the Grenadines mention of our hosting of four teams in the Preliminaries of the T20 Cricket World Cup has not yet engendered a level of enthusiasm that should us get involved. Perhaps it is that the memories of CWC2007 are still weighing on our cricket enthusiasts.
While there have been announcements of work being undertaken on our cricket facilities, the sporting public are all too aware of the excessive wastage when such activities are being done. Importantly, they are also. Very conscious of the lack of maintenance of whatever is constructed such that in very short order we will be replacing them…again.
We have to guard against cricket’s fading interest for people to trek to competition venues instead of being satisfied with the television coverage and/or the reliance on Apps.
Vincentians oncer loved the entertainment of and at cricket matches. We have witnessed significant declines in attendance at matches at the local and regional levels. This year offers an opportunity to recapture lost ground amongst Vincentian cricket aficionados.
The Local Organising Committee must find creative ways of ensuring that our hosting of matches in the T20 Cricket World Cup filter benefits down to the growing numbers if small businesses in our nation, however limited these may be.
It matters little to small businesses and indeed, all Vincentians, that T20 Cricket World Cup also enriches the coffers of Sandals and the large hotels.
It must always be remembered that we all have to live and that opportunities should not be limited to a select few.
Our politicians must learn to listen to others, especially the masses. They need to resist the temptation to repeatedly claim to be ‘on the ground’ because of they do go to the ground at all it is only for a very short time. They really do not know the ground to which the so often refer. The f act is. That the ‘ground’ now know that there are often used purely for votes and that there is little genuine care for their well-being.
