One very ex­pe­ri­enced field ath­lete in the per­son of Cleopa­tra Borel and ris­ing 400m track star, Machel Ce­de­nio, de­served­ly won the pres­ti­gious Sports­woman and Sports­man of the year award for their sig­nif­i­cant achieve­ments dur­ing 2015.

For Borel, it was the third straight year of win­ning the award; the gold medal at the Pan Amer­i­can Games in the shot put event in Toron­to sure­ly did it for her.

Of great sig­nif­i­cance in be­ing award­ed is the fact that Borel's first ac­claim goes back to 2006; it shows her not on­ly as a class per­former but one who has per­sist­ed and achieved ex­cel­lence over more than a decade of per­form­ing at the high­est lev­els pos­si­ble. In­deed, her gold in Toron­to was her first at the Pan Am Games, an in­di­ca­tion that she is im­prov­ing her game. Cleopa­tra should be an ex­am­ple and an in­spi­ra­tion to her young team­mates.

For young Ce­de­nio, it has been a suc­cess­ful move­ment from be­ing the top ju­nior 400m per­former to show­ing that he can now take on the com­pe­ti­tion at the high­est lev­el and still achieve suc­cess. His ma­jor per­for­mances in 2015 were at the Pan Am Games in Toron­to where he won sil­ver in the 400m and an­chored the TT re­lay team to the gold medal. What im­me­di­ate­ly sets Ce­de­nio apart is his fin­ish­ing pow­er; he is ab­solute­ly dev­as­tat­ing in the fi­nal 50 me­tres.

The ex­pec­ta­tion is that his coach­es will work on this tremen­dous fin­ish­ing pow­er and speed to hone them to the point of mak­ing him a se­ri­ous con­tender for the 400m at this year's Olympic Games in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.

Com­men­da­tion must al­so go out to Ren­ny Quow, an­oth­er 400m spe­cial­ist; he at­tract­ed the most votes to be named the Peo­ple's Choice ath­lete of the year. And while we have to re­main fo­cused on the present and the im­me­di­ate fu­ture with our ath­letes con­cen­trat­ing on Au­gust in Rio, we can­not for­get the great per­form­ers of the past in Janet Bai­ley be­ing award­ed posthu­mous­ly the Alexan­der B Chap­man dis­tin­guished per­former recog­ni­tion.

As a re­minder to the present gen­er­a­tion, Janet Bai­ley was a tow­er­ing and ro­bust de­fend­er who gave no quar­ter on the net­ball court to op­po­nents dur­ing the gold­en age of TT net­ball when we were joint world cham­pi­ons with Aus­tralia and New Zealand. Nei­ther should the young sports­woman and sports­man of the year awardees, Khal­i­fa St Fort track and field, and Jeron Thomp­son in the pool, should be for­got­ten; so too the Sports Per­son­al­i­ty award win­ner, Akeem Stew­art. What the awards have done is to be­gin to point in the di­rec­tion of the prepa­ra­tion work for the Olympics. Too of­ten in the past it has been a case of a mad scram­ble at the end to get a team to­geth­er for con­cen­trat­ed prepa­ra­tion in the last six month lead up to the games. Such hasti­ly scram­bled to­geth­er prepa­ra­tion, more pre­cise­ly the lack of it, is in con­trast to the years of prepa­ra­tion and the set­tling of mat­ters a cou­ple years in ad­vance by the great Olympic per­form­ing coun­tries.

Spon­sor­ship by the pri­vate sec­tor, con­tin­u­ous sup­port of our ath­letes by the state, es­sen­tials such as com­pe­ti­tion at in­ter­na­tion­al meets lead­ing to the Games, qual­i­fy­ing times of ath­letes, se­cured equip­ment and much more must be set­tled over the next cou­ple months and not be­come a source for con­tention in the weeks be­fore com­pe­ti­tion. Pres­i­dent of the na­tion­al Olympics As­so­ci­a­tion, Bri­an Lewis has set out the am­bi­tious tar­get of TT win­ning 10 gold medals at the Olympics by 2024. That ob­jec­tive hinges on get­ting the nit­ty grit­ty of the present right if the long term goal is to be achieved.