It has long been said that the Olympics is war by oth­er means. If this is so then T&T keeps send­ing boy scouts in­to a world War. Yes, boy scouts promise to be al­ways ready and to do their best.

I keep hear­ing from some of the Caribbean and T&T ath­letes af­ter they have ex­it­ed their event that they were "hap­py to be here" and from oth­ers who went deep­er in­to the com­pe­ti­tion "I just want­ed to make the fi­nal." I al­ways thought that the Olympics, out­side of its creed, was about win­ning medals. Ap­par­ent­ly, of­fi­cials and ath­letes set dif­fer­ent goals when par­tic­i­pat­ing in these games. Some go for ex­pe­ri­ence, the green ones want to be part of his­to­ry, oth­ers at­tend be­cause they met the qual­i­fy­ing stan­dard, the more am­bi­tious ones to make the fi­nal, and a hand­ful, to medal. The TTOC was quick to de­clare the size of the con­tin­gent (quan­ti­ty) and the camp from which the ath­letes will launch their cam­paign but gave no in­di­ca­tion of qual­i­ty and the pos­si­bil­i­ty or prob­a­bil­i­ty of our ath­letes medal­ing.

If you are to achieve ten golds by 2024 the process must be more sys­tem­at­ic so the out­come is more pre­dictable. Right now there is no process, on­ly re­wards if the goals are achieved. With this method you can­not claim that the re­wards were the dri­ving force be­hind the per­for­mance. The fi­nan­cial sup­port to elite ath­letes is like reap­ing what was not sown. A new crop of ath­letes from a nurs­ery is need­ed for 2024 and put the aged and tired legs of the present team out to pas­ture.

Our Olympic team of the fu­ture should have:

1. no one go­ing to these games "for ex­pe­ri­ence." There are the Na­tion­al Cham­pi­onships; CAC Games; Pan Amer­i­can Games; Com­mon­wealth Games and even the World Cham­pi­onships where ath­letes can gath­er ex­pe­ri­ence.

2. met the Olympic qual­i­fy­ing stan­dard. How­ev­er, if we are look­ing for ath­letes to medal they must al­so have a world rank­ing in the top ten achieved in the year of the Olympics, prefer­ably from the World Cham­pi­onships clos­est to the Olympics.

3. the "Top Ten" rule as the guid­ing prin­ci­ple. This will help the se­lec­tors to be wary about ath­letes that trot the globe out­side of Olympic sea­son win­ning meets in the ab­sence of the top guns. They too must meet the ul­ti­mate stan­dard when the bells toll for Olympics.

4. T&T's best. How­ev­er, best will count on­ly if the ath­lete is in the world top ten lead­ing up to or in the year of the Olympics.

5. been se­lect­ed by a com­mit­tee that has a clear cut pol­i­cy on ath­letes with dual cit­i­zen­ship want­i­ng to rep­re­sent T&T as coun­try of sec­ond choice. The top ten pol­i­cy solves this prob­lem. If these peo­ple have a top ten rank­ing I am al­most cer­tain that they will not have to seek refuge in their sec­ond home and pa­tri­ots will not get bumped ac­ci­den­tal­ly or in­ten­tion­al­ly.

6. guilty feel­ings tak­ing an ath­lete to the Olympics sim­ply to chalk up at­ten­dances for record pur­pos­es. If the per­son does not medal by the first or sec­ond games, age sets in bring­ing di­min­ish­ing re­turns. Even where a gold was achieved in the "ear­lies" the colour tends to fade with the pas­sage of time. The world top ten still ap­plies.

7. giv­en the pop­u­la­tion the as­sur­ance that the ath­letes are drug-free. I would hate to know that the hard work was re­ward­ed with gold and be­cause of a delin­quent col­league the coun­try was pe­nalised with dis­qual­i­fi­ca­tion. There must be no for­give­ness for drug cheats.

8. Par­tic­i­pa­tion in a "new sport" should not in any way be pam­pered by low­er­ing the stan­dard. These ath­letes, too, must step up to the plate.

TTOC, if our ath­letes can­not take the heat get them out of the kitchen. With our re­vised stan­dards ,Tokyo and be­yond look out for T&T be­cause we are com­ing! Not like war­riors but like sav­ages sat­is­fied with on­ly gold!

Lennox Fran­cis,

Cou­va