Olympism

The recent announcements by the National Sports Council of its seeming disappointment with the response from national sports associations to its annual awards comes as no surprise.

Over the past several years the national associations seemed to have been less responsive to the activity and there is an urgent need to examine the reasons for the change. One needs to examine whether there has been any change at all and therefore reflects a broader lethargy amongst the governing bodies of the sport at the present time. Read the rest of this entry »

The latest edition of the FIFA World Cup ended last Sunday just as it started, with a very tame and highly controversial game that did little for the FIFA and host organisers.

Perhaps this year’s edition of the World Cup would go down in history among the dullest of all time, with no real reason for connoisseurs of the sport all aghast at the level to which this once most prized possession has sunk. Read the rest of this entry »

The year 2009 witnesses The News newspaper achieving 20 years of existence, a tremendous feat indeed for the media in St Vincent and the Grenadines.

Early Days

When The News first started it was stated in no uncertain terms that it was going to be a very different type of production and aimed at raising the bar in terms of the content and the quality of the final product.

The first location was upstairs the building that now houses Randy’s Supermarket on Bay Street, Kingstown. If one entered the building at the time one would have found a very frugal set up. Things looked somewhat dishevelled but effective and everyone involved was so committed to the institution that all pitched in on the Wednesday evenings, into the nights and the wee hours of Thursday mornings to ensure that everything was as it should be. Read the rest of this entry »

Many have pointed to the capacity of sport to facilitate unity among peoples of the world. Indeed, it is one of the principles of the founding fathers of the Olympic Movement that sport should engender harmony among peoples to the point where the world would eventually become united. The reality is that this has never happened and today we are as far away from achieving this as has been the case in the age of antiquity.
In the 1950s the Caribbean officially attempted the establishment of the West Indies Federation. The institution was seen as a mechanism to facilitate the unity of the region. Unfortunately, the leaders of the smaller islands of the Caribbean started Federation. Grenada’s TA Marryshow was from a small island. Jamaica read into the establishment of the Federation the hands of the smaller islands more generally and claimed via a national referendum that the union would have allowed these islands to prey on their economic fortunes thereby leading to the impoverishment of Jamaica. Nothing could be father from the truth. Jamaica and Jamaicans did not allow themselves the benefit of careful analysis of the reality that the Caribbean is made up of rocks that are far too populated and too short of valuable sustainable resources to sustain themselves individually and independently; that their overall, individual well being is inevitably intertwined with that of all of the others in the region unless an otherwise return to some variant of colonialism. Read the rest of this entry »