Bri­an Lewis

If you look in the the­saurus for the word sport, you will find words such as pas­time, en­ter­tain­ment, amuse­ment and di­ver­sion.

There are many ded­i­cat­ed peo­ple putting in a lot of time and en­er­gy to de­liv­er the ben­e­fits that can come through sport. But they are be­com­ing dis­heart­ened. Their en­thu­si­asm is wan­ing in the face of many prob­lems, fraud­u­lent state­ments, lies, spec­u­la­tion and things go­ing wrong. Neg­a­tive at­tacks take on a life of their own and live on.

Love and pas­sion pro­vide the im­pe­tus for not giv­ing up, but at some point the re­al­i­ty that love and pas­sion aren't hard cur­ren­cy that can buy gro­ceries or pay the bills hits home. Then the ques­tion as to why am I do­ing this? How do those who have to deal with the de­mor­al­is­ing frus­tra­tions keep some sem­blance of san­i­ty, faith and trust?

Sport is em­braced by al­most every­one, in­clud­ing politi­cians and busi­ness lead­ers. The adu­la­tion when our elite lev­el ath­letes and na­tion­al teams do well can be de­scribed as awe­some.

Dr Roy Mc Cree in a pa­per en­ti­tled The Ex­clu­sion of Sport from Caribbean Eco­nom­ic De­vel­op­ment, made the point that his­tor­i­cal­ly sport has been ex­clud­ed from of­fi­cial and dom­i­nant no­tions of eco­nom­ic de­vel­op­ment in the Caribbean and that the fac­tors for that ex­clu­sion rep­re­sent the colo­nial de­rived, re­ceived or or­tho­dox view of sport.

If you said sport in T&T is fac­ing an un­cer­tain fu­ture you would not be tak­en se­ri­ous­ly. How­ev­er, it is a re­al­i­ty that sport is strug­gling. For the ma­jor­i­ty of sport or­gan­i­sa­tions and gov­ern­ing bod­ies the last year has been the most dif­fi­cult pe­ri­od fi­nan­cial­ly for quite a while and it's not go­ing to get bet­ter.

Na­tion­al sport or­gan­i­sa­tions and gov­ern­ing bod­ies must plan for all out­comes in­clud­ing the best case sce­nario and the worst case. What's even more im­por­tant is be­ing able to make ra­tio­nal and ob­jec­tive de­ci­sions that are in the best in­ter­est of sport.

When sport is run­ning on fi­nan­cial fumes it tends to bring out the worse in every­one. As na­tion­al sport or­gan­i­sa­tions and na­tion­al gov­ern­ing bod­ies' bat­tle on a dai­ly ba­sis to sus­tain­ably de­vel­op sport, they have to keep look­ing in the mir­ror be­fore look­ing out of the win­dow.

Sig­nif­i­cant achieve­ments have nev­er been ob­tained by tak­ing small risks on unim­por­tant is­sues.

Na­tion­al sport or­gan­i­sa­tions and na­tion­al gov­ern­ing bod­ies, in­clud­ing the TTOC, can no longer avoid cham­pi­oning and ad­vo­cat­ing for sport from a cap­i­tal ac­cu­mu­la­tion and eco­nom­ic de­vel­op­ment per­spec­tive.

We spend too much time, ef­fort and at­ten­tion on stuff that isn't ben­e­fi­cial or sus­tain­able. It's time to shift the fo­cus from solv­ing prob­lems to recog­nis­ing op­por­tu­ni­ties.

From a strate­gic and pol­i­cy per­spec­tive it's about be­ing proac­tive, stay­ing abreast of what's hap­pen­ing and us­ing the op­por­tu­ni­ty to shape and cre­ate a sus­tain­able fu­ture for sport.

It's not just spin.

Many sport stake­hold­ers are pulling their punch­es or hes­i­tat­ing to ex­press their views. They have be­come ten­ta­tive and over­ly fo­cused on be­ing po­lit­i­cal­ly cor­rect- avoid­ing con­fronting sen­si­tive is­sues or mak­ing waves.

We have to stop tip­toe­ing around sig­nif­i­cant is­sues.

How do we grow ex­po­nen­tial the eco­nom­ic foot­print of sport?

Who is will­ing to bet on sport as an eco­nom­ic game chang­er? How do we rec­ti­fy the valid con­cerns and ob­vi­ate the fail­ure to em­brace the eco­nom­ic de­vel­op­ment and trans­for­ma­tion of sport in T&T.

Why are we miss­ing the boat or is there some­thing more sin­is­ter at play?

It's time to tear down the wall of op­po­si­tion and re­sis­tance to the eco­nom­ic de­vel­op­ment and trans­for­ma­tion of sport in T&T.

The path to sus­tain­able sport suc­cess, growth and de­vel­op­ment starts with a crit­i­cal look in the mir­ror.

Bri­an Lewis is pres­i­dent of the T&T Olympic Com­mit­tee. The views ex­pressed are not nec­es­sar­i­ly those of the Olympic Com­mit­tee.