In an ef­fort to bring more ath­letes and fans to our shores, the Sport Com­pa­ny of T&T (SporTT) sent two of­fi­cials to the re­cent­ly held World Mar­ket in Lon­don.

A mis­sion from T&T or­gan­ised by the Min­istry of Tourism left these shores for the event and CEO of SporTT, Adri­an Ray­mond saw it as an op­por­tu­ni­ty to ad­ver­tise this coun­try's sports fa­cil­i­ties, as well as gain valu­able in­for­ma­tion on op­er­at­ing sys­tems for the mega fa­cil­i­ties cur­rent­ly un­der con­struc­tion.

Rep­re­sent­ing SporTT were Ky­ron Serette and Natasha Nunez. Serette speak­ing on the Sports Dri­ve on Her­itage Ra­dio said: "This was a fan­tas­tic op­por­tu­ni­ty for us to take part in the world mar­ket. What we found is that peo­ple nor­mal­ly view us here in the Caribbean as just a hol­i­day des­ti­na­tion but we were able to get to of­fi­cials from many of the par­tic­i­pat­ing coun­tries to let them know that we have a lot to of­fer."

Nunez who is a com­mu­ni­ca­tions of­fi­cer at SporTT said: "A num­ber of them were sur­prised to know that we have these great fa­cil­i­ties on hand. Now teams can come here for camps ahead of ma­jor world events and this is what we are fo­cussing on. So it is not just about hav­ing teams com­ing here for com­pe­ti­tions.

"We have world class fa­cil­i­ties un­der con­struc­tion at the mo­ment and are due to be com­plet­ed soon.

"Sport­ing as­so­ci­a­tions around the world can now send their teams to our coun­try and in ad­di­tion to hav­ing great weath­er for train­ing, they can al­so en­joy the won­der­ful fa­cil­i­ties and the added on is of course our love­ly beach­es. The peo­ple in our coun­try are al­so warm and open and this is some­thing we need to al­low them to know as well."

Both Nunez and Serette al­so took the op­por­tu­ni­ty to move away from the pro­ceed­ings of the World Mar­ket and vis­it many places of in­ter­est, in terms of sport de­vel­op­ment.

Ac­cord­ing to Serette: "We vis­it­ed SPORT Eng­land and whilst there, we were able to get very valu­able in­for­ma­tion in terms of sport de­vel­op­ment and fa­cil­i­ty man­age­ment.

"We have the Aquat­ic Cen­tre, the Cy­cling Velo­drome, the Ten­nis Cen­tre and many oth­er small­er fa­cil­i­ties that can be used by in­ter­na­tion­al ath­letes. We were able to bring back in­for­ma­tion that could be used to en­hance the facil­ties.

"For in­stance, when we vis­it­ed the Eng­lish Cy­cling Cen­tre we no­ticed sim­ple things that we did not know, like mak­ing sure the doors to the fa­cil­i­ty opened out­wards.

"By do­ing this the cy­clists are not af­fect­ed by the air mov­ing in and out of the build­ing. Then there are oth­er as­pects of de­sign that might be cost­ly right now but is some­thing we can im­ple­ment as we go along."

Nunez was par­tic­u­lar­ly im­pressed with the Swim­ming are­na in Lon­don, say­ing: "They had ad­justable floors in their div­ing pools and prac­tice pools, so they could have eas­i­ly var­ied the depth of the pool. We were lucky to wit­ness these things be­cause now we can as­sist by giv­ing this in­for­ma­tion to our tech­ni­cal peo­ple."

Serette end­ed by say­ing that all this in­for­ma­tion gained could come to noth­ing with fol­low up and they have since been in con­tact with all the of­fi­cials, they met since their ar­rival home and they have promised to open bi-lat­er­al com­mu­ni­ca­tion for all con­cerned.