NATIONAL DISGRACE

Organisers of the many of the development track meets being held inside the Corporate Area this season are being confronted with the challenge of finding an appropriate venue to host their events.

The situation is that the track at the Stadium East and the one inside the National Stadium are being repaired as they have become badly worn from ‘overuse’.

Jamaica is a track and field nation. We have a flood of meets at the start of each outdoor season and we have the largest high school track meet in the world.

This year we have come to realise that the tracks have become worn; the two at the stadium complex and the other at the GC Foster College.

This weekend the Queens/Grace Jackson meet will be held under trying circumstances because the national stadium will be shared with a Jehovah Witness Convention that had been booked for the weekend.

Why did it come to this? Why did we not have an alternative venue, a suitable alternative venue to host a meet where most of our senior athletes, the very best in the world, will start their seasons?

The leaders of government and the sport, in my opinion, still see sport a only recreation and not a business. With the success of our athletes this country has leverage to accomplish many things.

Each year more and more international athletes are seeking to visit Jamaica to train even as winter maintains its strangehold in their respective homelands.

For these countries the cost to lay a running track is relatively miniscule and is something we could have negotiated years ago had we the foresight. We need to start seeing sport as business and not only as recreation. Should we start doing that we can use the leverage that our athletes have given us to have better facilities for our athletes to train, better facilities which we can use to develop our young athletes, and better facilities which we can use as lure to attract athletes from overseas as well as their families to come here to spend their winters training and living in tropical sunshine.
What have now are broken down palaces, that limit our opportunities for growth in the respective sports and are nothing short of a national disgrace.