Pres­i­dent of the T&T Olympic Com­mit­tee (TTOC), Bri­an Lewis, has ex­pressed sur­prise at state­ments at­trib­uted to sprint­er Ke­ston Bled­man af­ter he pulled up dur­ing the first round of the 100 me­tres at the World Cham­pi­onships cur­rent­ly be­ing held in Bei­jing.

Speak­ing af­ter pulling up, Bled­man said: "My sea­son is done here. I have to pull out of all my meets. There is now no re­lay team be­cause we were al­ready down to a bare four, and sor­ry to say, this is on Trinidad. I told them, and my coach told them it was not smart for me to go to the Pan Am (Games). I do not know who it is, NAAA or TTOC, but I more feel it is TTOC be­cause it is like we giv­ing you guys fund­ing, so once they call you, you have to come but (look at) no one sent their top ath­letes there, but I had to go. There is a need to lis­ten to the ath­letes some­times. It is not al­ways about fund­ing. Yes, you giv­ing us fund­ing but there are times when you lis­ten. In the end it was not in God's plans for me to­day."

Clear­ly-as­ton­ished Lewis told the Trinidad Guardian: "I was very sur­prised to read what was said and I can un­der­stand the depth of his frus­tra­tion, based on all that I have read and the sit­u­a­tion in Chi­na where his aim was to do much bet­ter for all of us. At the TTOC, it is the same, we all want our ath­letes to at­tain their goals." He said it was al­ways the pol­i­cy of the TTOC to en­sure that an ath­lete's wel­fare, health and fu­ture is first pri­or­i­ty. "I can cat­e­gor­i­cal­ly with­out fear of con­tra­dic­tion say that we will nev­er force an ath­lete to run where there are con­cerns over an in­jury. I have spo­ken with both the chef de mis­sion, Di­anne Hen­der­son and the chief of the med­ical staff for the Games in Toron­to, Dr Ter­ry Ali, and both have no knowl­edge of such." Lewis, who has start­ed a cam­paign to ben­e­fit ath­letes un­der the ban­ner '10 or more Olympic gold medals by 2024' said that peo­ple who know him will know that he is ath­lete cen­tred and ath­lete dri­ven. "I do not know who may have told Ke­ston this but it was not the TTOC."

Lewis ex­plained that while it was the TTOC's be­lief that the best ath­letes should rep­re­sent their coun­try and they nor­mal­ly will have con­sul­ta­tion with all re­lat­ed na­tion­al or­gan­i­sa­tions on such, there is a process if an ath­lete has to miss a games.

"All the ath­lete needs to do is to present a med­ical cer­tifi­cate show­ing the in­jury sta­tus and of course cer­tain­ly we will en­sure he is with­drawn." Lewis called on Bled­man to con­tact the T&TOC. "If the TTOC can as­sist him with any of his med­ical needs at the mo­ment, he should con­tact us and we can sit down with him and his team and work some­thing out be­cause Ke­ston, like all our ath­letes is very im­por­tant to this ath­lete dri­ven Olympic body."