Funding of Athletes – A National Conversation
St Vincent and the Grenadines is not, by any means, a financially wealthy country but is has a population that is well endowed in respect of its sporting talent. Whether we are sufficiently committed to identifying, cultivating and promoting the talented among us is an entirely different matter.
What must be said is that the decades of nationhood have not witnessed any genuine commitment to sport as anything but an appeasement to the electorate and an egotistical political showpiece.
Over the years, Vincentians have been treated like children being given trinkets designed to infatuate, not satisfy nor respond to identified needs and desires consistent with their God-given talents in sport. It is the reason that seven years after the closure of the ET Joshua airport and the opening of the Argyle International, Vincentians were called upon to trek to the Arnos Vale Sports Complex to see lights being turned on at the idyllic Arnos Vale #1and perhaps ‘marvel’ at the replacement of the more traditional ‘Party Stand’ into unnecessary ‘pools’ that failed to appeal to the Vincentian lovers of sport.
Is should also not surprise that instead of engaging in periodic review of the National Sports Policy and systemic analyses of the state of sport and attendant facilities, we have instead utilised the financial resources of the National Lotteries Authority (NLA) to establish ‘playing’ facilities, as willy nilly vote seeking entities that are clearly ‘fit for political purposes’.
Interestingly, the government’s history of sport development has remained adhocratic, driven by the reading of the political temperature of the nation’s youth rather than a carefully constructed policy and aggressively developmental programme.
Athletes have become political pawns only when success is attained with little consideration given to identifying and positively responding to their critical needs. There is little or no interest in understanding the pathway to sporting success and, by extension, providing the funding necessitated by pursuit and attainment of elite status in sport.
Today’s elite athlete
For the past several years sport has enjoyed global status as one of the fastest growing industries. Unfortunately, this fact appears yet to be understood by our government.
Whilst the sporting industry continues to grow rapidly the same has been happening with the expenses of athletes who aspire to excellence in respect of their sporting careers. In St Vincent and the Grenadines athletes seem to be under immense pressure to find adequate financial resources to meet their growing needs. It needs to be said that this is not a problem unique to St Vincent and the Grenadines. However, there seems little interest here, in working with national sports associations, clubs, coaches and administrators to arrive at what could be deemed a reasonable, practical approach to finding solution to help those with the potential to achieve success.
Gone are the days when athletes were expected to make their way to success in their sport of choice all by themselves. Today, sport has become more scientific, and the individual athletes has to engage a number of specialised personnel in order to meet the demands of getting to the point of success.
Today’s athlete is usually surrounded by a team of specialised practitioners. He/she has to have access to a physical trainer who, among other skills should have competency in weight training relative to the requirements of the particular sport in which the athlete is engaged. The athlete needs a coach specific to the sport being practised. A nutritionist is also part of the team working with the athlete, to ensure that the latter utilises balanced meals and drinks throughout his/her training and competition regimen.
Today, much attention is paid to the mental state of the athlete in a manner never really existed before. While this feature has been considered important to the athletes’ general well-being, the ‘meltdown’ experienced by Simone Biles at the Summer Olympics in Tokyo, Japan, in 2021, brought its importance to sport performance received significant attention. Now, there is much discussion amongst the team of professionals working with athletes about the importance of ensuring that the athlete is never allowed to fall prey to the pressures of getting to and sustaining the highest level of all-round preparation for competition.
Lauren Burns, Juanita Weissensteiner, Marc Cohen and Stephen Bird conducted a study that examined the perceptions of 135 Australian athletes drawn from across 25 Olympic sports regarding their lifestyle practices and support services. The results revealed that international athletes “perceived psychological skills and attributes, along with strong interpersonal relationships as vital to their success, and they also rated ‘Recovery practices’ as very important and made extensive use of available support services. These athletes also indicated that they would have liked access to these services earlier in their careers, a wish that was reiterated by the sub-elite athletes. Furthermore, athletes wanted greater knowledge, mentoring, and autonomy earlier in their careers, and the importance of ‘athlete wellbeing’ as well as ‘athletic performance’ was evident in a number of contexts”.
The study, published in the National Library of Medicine – National Center for Biotechnology Information, (https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8725551/), concluded that “An athlete development system into which these are included may assist in generating an environment that facilitates athlete success, repeated podium performances, retain athletes in high-performance sport for longer, encourage human-flourishing, wellbeing and smooth transitions for retiring athletes”.
The foregoing documentation lends credence to the argument by some athletes who are on an elite pathway in their respective sports of the heavy financial demands placed on them. Not all of our athletes have been able to be in a sport that allows for good financial returns. Adonal Foyle was an exception since his skill competencies allowed him access to the professional league of the prestigious and lucrative NBA in the USA.
Our cricketers who were fortunate to get recruited to play County cricket in the UK, earned themselves some money and their basic needs were provided for in the contracts they signed. In the early days of selection to the West Indies cricket team did not lead to major revenue earnings. Admittedly, the Kerry Packer cricket experiment in Australia sparked a major revolution in the sport at the time and our cricketers were finally offered earnings that afforded them a career in the sport.
Today, things are very different. The introduction of the Indian Premier League (IPL) and the several leagues that it has spawned across the globe, readily transforms capable cricketers into millionaires in relatively quick time, changing the attraction of the sport to youths in a manner no one anticipated.
The income generating capacity of sports differ and hence some athletes are more capable of affording their financial requirements to stay at the top of their game. However, we are well aware that some athletes squander their income, ignore that physical well-being, only to be broke shortly after retirement.
Vincentian athletes
In St Vincent and the Grenadines, we have seen the growth of several of the sports practised in the country. The size of the economy has not really expanded much over the years, and the private sector remains relatively small. It is therefore understandable that money is not circulating as much as one would expect.
For St Vincent and the Grenadines, sport has not yet received the attention it deserves even though we are experiencing growth and development in the sector.
Sport is not yet seen as a major pillar of the Vincentian economy. Athletes are met at the airport after successes abroad and little happens thereafter. Their contribution to the international image of the nation is hardly recognised and they are often left to ‘beg’ for financial assistance just about everywhere, leaving them bothered as to what they mean to us.
While the success stories of the likes of Kineke Alexander and now Shafiqua Maloney have been making the rounds in the media, they remain classic examples of the challenges facing our athletes, more generally.
There has to be a national discussion on sport and its role in national development. The mere provision of a synthetic surface does not automatically mean that the sport of athletics will develop athletes in significant numbers in the future. It is certainly a help but if the general well-being of the athletes is not understood and appropriate funding put in place to meet the requirements of the athletes in terms of the team that has to be built around them to enable success, they will come to naught.
Where the athlete lives, how he/she lives, what access does he/she have to the complex requirements mentioned earlier in this Column, are critical to having them achieve a level where they can access sponsorship from a sportswear company enough to have a fulfilling career in the sport of choice.
Our athletes do not generally, with few exceptions, come from homes where their fundamental sport needs are afforded. While many parents try to be supportive of their children’s involvement in sport, they lack the finances required to sustain them.
National sports associations are stretched having to provide some of the most basic needs of the athletes they train and desire to expose to regional and international competition. We lament the spectre of scores of children competing on the harsh synthetic surface at the stadium in Diamond, without shoes. Many end their annual sports injured because of this fact.
Our limited facilities in some sports do not allow athletes to meet the training, nutritional and mental needs to realise their true sporting potential.
For decades we have paraded the NLA as supporting sport and culture. Unfortunately, to many of the athletes possessive of the requisite talent, the funding they expect to assist them in honing their skills and excel in sport is not readily accessible.
Sport cannot be reduced to having athletes joining the lines of the politicians’ ‘clinics’ begging for some funds to get this or that requirement met.
Let us get real.
Let the discourse begin on what we really want to do with sport and where we wish to locate it in the broader national development policy.
Political grandstanding on one platform after another every five years, making repeated vainglorious promises in exchange for voted does nothing to facilitate genuine sport development.
As a nation, we can certainly do better than what has been obtained in sport over the past several years.
