The excellent performance of Caribbean athletes at this year’s Olympic Games – in the recent past actually – must bringeternal pride to those of us who have always believed our boys and girls could conquer the world at track and field,in much the same wayour young men had vanquished all before them in cricket.
Pride of place in this pantheon of emerging heroes must go to the Jamaicans, who have almost single handedly taken on the Americans and shown them their heels. It is a tribute to all these small islands dotted throughout the Caribbean Sea that, with very scarce and sometimes non-existent resources, they have been able to produce world-class sportsmen and women.
Sometimes this home grown talent has had to seek greener pastures in larger countries where athletic prowess is used as a gateway to university education; and occasionally such gift has withered on the vine after a few promising summers.
Very often, the athlete adopts the host country when he competes internationally and his island of origin gets little credit, if any at all, for the critical early training of the new champion.
But the emergence in the recent past of the home grown-coach, producing local and regional athletes in the Caribbean environment, especially in Jamaica, has worked wonders for the profile of our athletes, affording them scintillating achievements.
With a level playing field, we are no longer the Cinderellas of the track, and our athletes are proving that cricket is not the only sport at which we can excel.
It is a massive political and social statement of self confidence that at this moment the world’s fastest man and the world’s fastest woman both live in this region, and that in some of the sprint events the region swept the board.
Impressively, both Usain Bolt and Shelly-Ann Fraser-Pryce were completely coached and nurtured right here in our midst. Not for them the journey to colder and distant lands. They are Caribbean athletes in a most literal sense, a major feature of self-confidence that must never be lost upon any of us.
We have produced world beaters now in sport and in the arts, and in so doing we have relied on local coaching talent for the most part.
This is a significant tribute to the Jamaican coaches, who like our own Frank Blackman, respected and revered as the coach of Olympian bronze medallist Obadele Thompson, have so perfected the art of training that they produce results, even overturning long established theories when necessary.
It is fitting that this emphatic statement of achievement of Caribbean people should be written on the canvas of the London 2012 Olympics. It is as if we chose British soil on which to finally shake the dust of foreign control from our feet.
To them all, we say congratulations, and keep on running!