Sean Nero

Olympic medal­list Lalonde Gor­don now has a trust in his name.

While some ath­letes get a stat­ue in ho­n­our of their ac­com­plish­ments and oth­ers have their name as­signed to a plane or sta­dia, the Lon­don 2012 Olympic achiev­er is to be laud­ed by the To­ba­go House of As­sem­bly (THA) with the ac­ti­va­tion of the Lalonde Gor­don Fund.

Huey Cadette, sec­re­tary for Sport, Ed­u­ca­tion and Youth Af­fairs con­firmed this yes­ter­day.

He ex­plained that while the fund was cre­at­ed two years ago, it was not yet launched and nei­ther had it be­ing op­er­a­tionalised. A board to over­see the fund had been ap­point­ed.

Cadette ex­pressed the hope that the fund would be­come op­er­a­tional in fis­cal 2015 with an ini­tial con­tri­bu­tion of $1 mil­lion from the THA.

Gor­don suc­cess­ful­ly medalled at the Lon­don 2012 Olympics in his pet events–the 400m and the 4x400 re­lay–where he se­cured bronze medals for T&T.

Through the cre­ation of this fund, the THA hoped to as­sist ath­letes and ad­min­is­tra­tors alike in their per­son­al de­vel­op­ment goals.

The es­tab­lish­ment of the fund, how­ev­er, was be­ing done in iso­la­tion, said the sec­re­tary.

The fund, he said, would form part of the As­sem­bly's To­ba­go Sport Pol­i­cy, which is still be­ing draft­ed, and aimed to set a clear man­date in re­la­tion to struc­tures and pro­ce­dures through which elite ath­letes ac­cessed fund­ing.

"Recog­nis­ing Lalonde Gor­don's ef­fort and his suc­cess at the Lon­don 2012 Olympics, the THA would have es­tab­lished a fund where mon­ey would be al­lo­cat­ed both by the THA and cor­po­rate T&T. This fund, of course would be man­aged by rep­re­sen­ta­tives of civ­il so­ci­ety and of course the As­sem­bly. The role of this fund would be to seek ap­pli­ca­tions from per­sons whether ad­min­is­tra­tors, ath­letes, or­gan­i­sa­tions who re­quires sup­port for pro­grammes re­lat­ed to sport, whether it is train­ing or ad­min­is­tra­tive cours­es," said Cadette.

He added: "That is es­sen­tial­ly what the fund is cre­at­ed for and we look for­ward to al­low­ing our ath­letes to thrive be­cause of the in­put com­ing from both the As­sem­bly and cor­po­rate T&T. We want to en­sure that whether you are play­ing ten­nis, ta­ble ten­nis, golf, bas­ket­ball or foot­ball that we can find ways to pro­vide sup­port for our ath­letes. So yes, there will be some dis­tinct dif­fer­ences in our pol­i­cy and the na­tion­al one (by the Min­istry of Sport). But over­all, our pol­i­cy will seek to com­pli­ment what hap­pens at the na­tion­al lev­el."