Se­nior sports re­porter Vin­ode Mam­chan walked away with the ma­jor prizes as the Guardian Sports Desk paid trib­ute to its mem­bers on Wednes­day at its an­nu­al Christ­mas lime. Mam­chan won the Re­porter of the Year as well as the Per­son­al­i­ty of the Year, fol­low­ing his out­stand­ing cov­er­age of West In­dies crick­et. Nigel Si­mon won the prize for the most pro­duc­tive work­er while Naz Ya­coob col­lect­ed an award for his out­stand­ing work on lo­cal crick­et and Ever­ard Gor­don was re­ward­ed for his ded­i­cat­ed ser­vice to the de­part­ment.

TOP RIGHT: Olympic cham­pi­on swim­mer George Bovell III hands over a spe­cial award to Naz Ya­coob.

RIGHT: Nigel Si­mon, left, is hand­ed his award by act­ing ed­i­tor in chief, An­tho­ny Wil­son

The au­di­ence at the event in­clud­ed for­mer West In­dies bat­ting leg­end Bri­an Lara, Fi­fa vice-pres­i­dent Jack Warn­er, Olympic cham­pi­on George Bovell, for­mer West In­dies Un­der 19 cap­tains Dud­nath Ramkissoon and Col­in Mur­ray. Al­so in at­ten­dance were TTOC sec­re­tary Bri­an Lewis, TSTT's Trudy de Ver­teuil, me­dia 21 man­ag­ing di­rec­tor Tim Nafziger, for­mer Miss T&T Ke­ne­sha Thom-Selvon, and mar­ket­ing en­tre­pre­neur Charise D'Abadie. In pay­ing trib­ute to Mam­chan, the de­part­ment's ed­i­tor Valenti­no Singh told the au­di­ence that he rep­re­sent­ed him­self with dis­tinc­tion through­out the year.

"He re­mained not on­ly a de­pend­able and fo­cused in­di­vid­ual but was al­ways look­ing to take the ini­tia­tive and help in what­ev­er way he could. His ef­forts helped to keep the de­part­ment to­geth­er and he showed a tremen­dous amount of will­ing­ness to learn every­thing he could about jour­nal­ism and lead­er­ship." In his re­sponse, Mam­chan thanked the mem­bers of the de­part­ment for recog­nis­ing his work and stat­ed that with­out their in­put he could not have achieved what he did. "It took a lot from all of us to pro­duce what we did and we want to promise all of you present here to­geth­er that come next year, we will not on­ly be the num­ber one pa­per for sports cov­er­age but we will be one, two and three."

AWARDS

Sports Per­son­al­i­ty of the Year - Vin­ode Mam­chan

Re­porter of the Year - Vin­ode Mam­chan

Best Cov­ered Beat - Naz Ya­coob

Most Pro­duc­tive Work­er- Nigel Si­mon

Ex­em­plary Award - Ever­ard Gor­don