An­dre Bap­tiste

I was cross­ing the road here in Lon­don, like a true Tri­ni, when I was al­most knocked over by a cy­clist. Luck­i­ly, I jumped quick­ly to the pave­ment, and looked around dis­dain­ful­ly to see three more cy­clists blow­ing past me. They seemed to be rac­ing among them­selves. That is when I knew it would be dif­fi­cult for Njisane Phillip to com­pete against the British in cy­cling. This coun­try has gone mad over cy­cling, with every­one be­liev­ing they were ei­ther Sir Chris Hoy or Vic­to­ria Pendle­ton. The Chi­nese love to cy­cle but there is no way they love cy­cling more than the British. Whether on foot­paths or on roads, or even in the Olympic Vil­lage, there are des­ig­nat­ed park­ing ar­eas for cy­cles. Britain, it ap­pears, has gone mad on cy­cling.

Giv­en the weath­er con­di­tions, it is amaz­ing that so many per­sons like this ac­tiv­i­ty. Per­haps it is be­cause of the cold­ness and the de­sire to reach their des­ti­na­tions quick­ly. What is al­so in­ter­est­ing is the amount of tech­nol­o­gy and hu­man re­source the British have in­vest­ed in this sport, from head­wear and bi­cy­cles be­ing man­u­fac­tured to the body type of the spe­cif­ic cy­clist. There is a al­so a full state-of-the-art trust­ing sys­tem in syn­chro­nised cir­cum­stances that al­lows the cy­clists to ex­pe­ri­ence var­i­ous con­di­tions. When you look at the num­ber of of­fi­cials con­nect­ed to the cy­clists here, they num­ber around 12 per­sons. This in­cludes coach­ing staff, an­a­lysts, nu­tri­tion­ists, ther­a­pists, phys­i­ol­o­gists and med­ical doc­tors. And there are some for­mer cy­cling cham­pi­ons from Britain for good mea­sure.

Phillip did not have even one-third of that sup­port. Each mem­ber of their team were spe­cial­ists, to­tal­ly ded­i­cat­ed to the cy­clists, while Njisane and all the ath­letes had to share ser­vices. This is clear­ly wrong. If we want to im­prove, we must sup­port the likes of Fitzbert Al­leyne, Zephyri­nus Nicholas, Oba Gul­ston, Karielle De Bique and of course the in­de­fati­ga­ble Ian Sharpe. As I re­flect­ed on the cy­cling here in Lon­don, I could not help but imag­ine how many young­sters have been in­spired by Phillip. The chal­lenge will be to use this suc­cess to in­spire a na­tion to cy­cle and be fit and safe. Phillip's per­for­mance must not fade. We must en­cour­age oth­er young­sters to get in­volved in the sport.