Get­ting over the dis­ap­point­ment of not see­ing the T&T flag hoist­ed and hear­ing the Na­tion­al An­them on the steel­pan at any of the medal cer­e­monies at the Paris Olympics is hard enough. An even tougher chal­lenge will be end­ing Team T&T’s medal drought.

This coun­try’s last Olympic medal was at the Rio 2016 Games when Keshorn Wal­cott got bronze in the javelin event, fol­low­ing up his gold medal from the Lon­don Olympics in 2012.

Since then, in two con­sec­u­tive Olympics, T&T’s ath­letes have re­turned emp­ty-hand­ed.

That is a sig­nif­i­cant drop in stan­dards for a na­tion that has won a to­tal of 19 Olympic medals over the years, in­clud­ing 15 in track and field, three in weightlift­ing, and one in swim­ming.

Af­ter the Japan 2020 Olympics — which were held in 2021 be­cause of COVID-19 — the chal­lenges of the pan­dem­ic were among the rea­sons giv­en for the then-Team T&T’s poor show­ing.

There can be no such ex­cuse this time around and the T&T Olympic Com­mit­tee (TTOC) and the var­i­ous sport­ing ad­min­is­tra­tions con­nect­ed with the 17-mem­ber con­tin­gent that went to Paris, need to do some se­ri­ous ex­am­i­na­tion of the stan­dards and sys­tems in­volved in putting to­geth­er teams to rep­re­sent this coun­try at ma­jor in­ter­na­tion­al mul­ti-sport events.

A post-mortem on T&T's per­for­mance in Paris re­quires hon­est, ob­jec­tive dis­cus­sions about all that is need­ed to pro­duce Olympic-qual­i­ty ath­letes for the 2028 Olympic Games in Los An­ge­les.

That al­so means lis­ten­ing to those in the sport­ing fra­ter­ni­ty who have been warn­ing for years about T&T’s fad­ing prospects for Olympic glo­ry, in­clud­ing for­mer sprint star Ato Boldon, who has been ac­cu­rate in his “no medals for T&T” fore­casts.

It is time to pay se­ri­ous at­ten­tion to the con­cerns Boldon has been rais­ing for years. Af­ter all, he is a four-time Olympic medal­list and one of this coun­try’s most suc­cess­ful ath­letes. How­ev­er, his crit­i­cism of the Na­tion­al As­so­ci­a­tion of Ath­let­ics Ad­min­is­tra­tion (NAAA) has not made him very pop­u­lar with­in that fra­ter­ni­ty, al­though he isn’t alone in his view that sport­ing bod­ies need to re­think their meth­ods for pick­ing teams for in­ter­na­tion­al events.

There is al­so a pre­vail­ing view that ath­letes and coach­es need to re­view their ap­proach­es to train­ing and oth­er prepa­ra­tions.

The bot­tom line is that a lot of things need to change. There­fore, full use must be made of the four years avail­able to pre­pare for the Sum­mer Olympics in Los An­ge­les.

New bench­marks of ath­let­ic ex­cel­lence were set at Paris 2024 and Team T&T, with nine first-time Olympians among the 17 who com­pet­ed in cy­cling, swim­ming and track and field, fell short of those high­er stan­dards.

The ex­cep­tion was 400-me­tre na­tion­al record-hold­er Jereem Richards, whose blis­ter­ing time of 43.78 sec­onds in that nail-bit­ing Olympic fi­nal was ag­o­nis­ing­ly close to a podi­um fin­ish.

But he was the on­ly mem­ber of the con­tin­gent to de­liv­er a per­son­al best per­for­mance in Paris.

If there are to be gold medal fin­ish­es for Team T&T in 2028, start­ing from now there must be high lev­els of com­mit­ment from the ath­letes, sports ad­min­is­tra­tors, Gov­ern­ment, cor­po­rate T&T and the wider com­mu­ni­ty.

Elite ath­letes don’t hap­pen by chance. They have to be dis­cov­ered and de­vel­oped, start train­ing from a very young age, ben­e­fit from state-of-the-art fa­cil­i­ties, and get top-notch coach­ing to reach the pin­na­cle. For any chance at gold medals in Los An­ge­les, T&T needs to get se­ri­ous about sport.