T&T Grand Games, Chief Ex­ec­u­tive Of­fi­cer (CEO) Regi­na John is call­ing on Olympic medal­list Ato Boldon to stop tar­nish­ing the im­age of the mem­bers of her or­gan­i­sa­tion.

John and mem­bers of her com­mit­tee have come in for se­vere crit­i­cism fol­low­ing their fail­ure to stage the Games, leav­ing scores of dis­ap­point­ed ath­letes. Boldon, coach of a num­ber of them, have de­scribed the com­mit­tee as in­com­pe­tent.

Not­ing that her or­gan­i­sa­tion had suf­fered over $500,000 in loss­es, John was adamant that the event was not "can­celled" but rather it had to be stopped be­cause of cir­cum­stances over which her or­gan­i­sa­tion had no con­trol.

While a lack of funds re­mained the main rea­son, she ex­plained that they need­ed li­cens­es to ac­quire pub­lic li­a­bil­i­ty in­sur­ances for ath­letes but did not get them in time as they could not se­cure ap­proval from Po­lice and Fire Ser­vices.

She said doc­u­ments were sub­mit­ted to the of­fice of the Com­mis­sion­er of Po­lice since Oc­to­ber last year but ap­proval was re­ceived on May 19, by which time, it was too late since she was al­ready in the bank ho­n­our­ing her or­gan­i­sa­tion's promise to re­fund ath­letes and oth­ers who spent their monies for the games.

A to­tal of 120 ath­letes were sched­uled to com­pete at the Games, sched­uled for the Hase­ly Craw­ford Sta­di­um, on May 21 and tick­ets were al­ready pur­chased for 60 to be present. Among them were 100 me­tre sprint­ers–Ja­maican Natasha Mor­ri­son who is ranked 11th in the world, T&T's Michelle Lee Ahye who is ranked ninth and Khal­i­fa St Fort, who is trained by Boldon.

T&T Olympic gold medal­list javelin throw­er Keshorn Wal­cott was al­so among the cast, along with T&T's Cleopa­tra Borel.

John re­vealed that sprint king Us­ain Bolt was orig­i­nal­ly in the cast but pulled out due to in­jury. "We were pleased to get Bolt but when he pulled out we had go back to the draw­ing board," John said.

She was adamant that her com­mit­tee meant well, say­ing they did all they could. "Boldon nev­er once came to us and talk about what went wrong, but he is on the me­dia every­day crit­i­cis­ing us for every­thing when he is not even aware of the amount of work we did. Had he done that, he would have seen where we fal­tered," John ex­plained.

She said Boldon's neg­a­tive com­ments may have con­tributed to the can­cel­la­tion of the af­ter par­ty event since peo­ple claimed they did not want to be as­so­ci­at­ed with any­thing neg­a­tive.

"We made a to­tal loss, so we tried to see what lit­tle could have been re­cov­ered from the af­ter par­ty. Peo­ple start­ed think­ing neg­a­tive of us but we have our lives to go on with so I wish Boldon would stop tar­nish­ing our rep­u­ta­tion," John said. "Peo­ple who bought tick­ets as well as ven­dors had to be paid back."

She said she would take the blame but peo­ple need­ed to know what tran­spired so that they would have a bet­ter idea, rather than lis­ten­ing to Boldon.

?WAL­TER AL­IBEY