Sh­er­nice Thomas

The T&T Olympic Com­mit­tee (TTOC) will of­fi­cial­ly eval­u­ate and dis­cuss the per­for­mances of all of T&T's Olympians at the Lon­don 2012 Games at an ex­ec­u­tive com­mit­tee meet­ing ear­ly next month. TTOC sec­re­tary gen­er­al, Bri­an Lewis, said yes­ter­day that the TTOC will re­ceive a com­pi­la­tion of re­ports from the team man­agers of the six sport­ing dis­ci­plines in which T&T was rep­re­sent­ed at the Lon­don Games which were: Ath­let­ics, box­ing, sail­ing, swim­ming, shoot­ing and cy­cling. Ac­cord­ing to Lewis the re­ports will in­clude analy­ses of each ath­lete's per­for­mance dur­ing their pe­ri­od of com­pe­ti­tion in Lon­don, in or­der to de­ter­mine ar­eas of im­prove­ment to de­ter­mine the way for­ward for Rio 2016 Olympics.

"The TTOC is all about ac­count­abil­i­ty. We have a sys­temic process to go through af­ter the com­ple­tion of any games whether it be the Olympics, the Pan Amer­i­can Games, CAC and Com­mon­wealth Games or any of the oth­er games that the TTOC is in charge of over­see­ing. So the work of the TTOC is an on­go­ing ba­sis, it doesn't just all stop af­ter the Olympics." "This year we were rep­re­sent­ed in six sports, so we will have six re­ports from the team man­agers who would al­so re­ceive in­puts from some of the ath­letes' coach­es. The re­ports will con­tain the team man­ag­er's analy­sis of each ath­lete and the en­tire team as a whole, and based on that they would al­so make rec­om­men­da­tions on what can be done dif­fer­ent­ly in the fu­ture to achieve bet­ter per­for­mances."

In stat­ing that the tar­gets for the 2016 Brazil Olympics in Rio de Janeiro will al­so be dis­cussed at the ex­ec­u­tive meet­ing, Lewis re­vealed that the team fell short of the TTOC's tar­get for Lon­don by just two medals as they pre­dict­ed a to­tal of six medals for the lo­cal team. How­ev­er, one of the TTOC's ex­pec­ta­tions was met with the win­ning of a gold medal.

"We will dis­cuss the tar­gets for this year and 2016 and we al­ready have a skele­ton project for 2020. This year, the TTOC's tar­get for Lon­don was six medals with at least one gold medal, we weren't sure from which dis­ci­pline it would come, but we knew we want­ed at least one gold medal." For the Rio Games, the TTOC has placed the ex­pec­ta­tions even high­er in­clud­ing two gold medals and rep­re­sen­ta­tion in at least two team sports.

"For Rio 2016, our tar­get is eight medals with at least two gold. And of the eight medals, we want 50 per cent to be won by women. In 2016 we would al­so like to be rep­re­sent­ed across ten sport­ing dis­ci­plines, with two of them be­ing team sports." Af­ter the ex­ec­u­tive com­mit­tee meet­ing, Lewis stat­ed that an­oth­er re­port will be pre­sent­ed to the TTOC's gen­er­al coun­cil at an­oth­er meet­ing soon af­ter in Sep­tem­ber, where a fi­nal sum­ma­ry on the Olympic team would be giv­en.