Champs: a journalism silly season
Published:Tuesday | February 18, 2014 | 12:00 AM
THE EDITOR, Sir:
It's Champs time again, and as usual, a kind of silly season begins. Armchair psychologists and physiologists, including some journalists, begin spouting off about what schools and coaches must do to 'preserve our wonderful record in track and field'. Once more we hear about athletes being 'overworked' and 'pressured', and accusations being made of coaches that for their own selfish ends, are 'sacrificing the future of our youngsters'.
Then they start naming athletes who were stars in their teens but never became world-beaters. It is as if they know nothing about early bloomers who never mature into international stars. We, they claim, are doing something wrong, and although more than one quarter of the world's top sprinters come from this tiny island, this is not good enough!
The latest outrage came from the jocular Sports Commentary. Oral Tracey, I suppose, might claim that he was joking when he claimed that St Jago High, because they wanted to win Champs, was overworking one of their young female athletes.
This belief among journalists that they must protect our young athletes is a relatively new phenomenon. Otherwise, when St Jago last wanted 'to win Girls Champs', they would have made the claim that Kerron Stewart, Melaine Walker, Kenia Sinclair and their other stars needed to be protected from their 'overambitious' coach. It was not fashionable then, and they did not. The school went on to win Champs and these athletes, like so many others from St Jago High, became world-class.
ISSA, an organisation of principals, having been carefully advised by experts, has put a limit on the number of events in which an athlete may participate at Champs. Yet we have these journalists and other armchair commentators, in order to sound wise and concerned, shooting off about matters on which they have done precious little research.
Freedom of speech is enshrined in our Constitution, so dem can gwaan talk. But I hope no one even begins to take them seriously.
KEITH NOEL
Former Principal
of St Jago