SILLY PERSONAL BATTLES HURTING ATHLETES

Jamaica has been blessed with an abundance of athletic talent. It is however cursed with some pretty petty leaders.
Here we have a situation where the Jamaica Amateur Athletic Association (JAAA) have this ongoing impasse with the leadership of the MVP track club, an organisation blessed with some of Jamaica’s most talented athletes.
This impasse has led to embarrassing fall outs at both the Beijing Olympics in 2008 and again at the World Athletic Championships in Berlin a year later.
Still there is not visible sign that a resolution is anywhere on the horizon.
In all of this, the athletes who have been very silent, are the ones who are suffering. They are the ones who lose face when their coach makes his embarrassment moves, and who lose face when members of the public perceives them of being greedy and not keen of representing their country when nothing could be farther from the truth.
The situation has become so toxic that Delano Franklyn, noted attorney and Chairman of the Asafa Powell Foundation in a recent lecture  delivered at the Jamaica Pegasus Hotel entitled Sport in Jamaica: A Local and International Perspective, in making recommendations for the improvements in governance of the sport, suggested that for the sport to move forward, said “The management of the JAAA and the MVP Track Club, in the interest of the sport, in the interest of the athletes and in the interest of Jamaica, need to sit down, put hubris and idiosyncracies aside and work out their differences.”
We dont know if both sides were listening but here on the eve of the Jamaica International Invitational will be without the best of the MVP athletes.
A couple of weeks ago when the meet was being announced, two hours before the announcement was to be made of which athletes-  local and international - would be participating, Meet Director Donald Quarrie announced that MVP had withdrawn their athletes from the meet citing scheduling conflicts or something of the sort. However, that conflict in scheduling would not affect Michael Frater and Nesta Carter, athletes, who it seems, refuse to be caught in the crossfire between the feuding leadership.
Then, a week later Olympic 100 metre silver medallist Sherone Simpson declared that she was interested in participating at the JII.
However, when MVP declared their athletes unavailable, replacements were sought and found. Simpson now finds that she is unable to get a lane because the one that she would have had, has now gone to someone else.
This is such a tragedy for one of Jamaica’s most beloved athletes and now she will miss out on another opportunity to perform before an audience that love her so much.
Meet Director Donald Quarrie made this revelation on my show Sportsnation Live on Nationwide90fm on Wednesday.
In time what has happened to Simpson could affect the other athletes from the MVP camp, which is unjust.
The athletes are not pawns to be used in some ridiculous game of ego and one-up-manship being played by the leaders of both entities.
It needs to stop. If the big men feel the need to fight like boys, they need to understand that athletes cannot be the collateral damage in this childish polarising fight.