“I laid it all out on the track today,” said quarter-miler Jereem “The Dream” Richards in a heartfelt response after his valiant, country and self-committed effort in the Olympic Games 400 metre final at the Stade de France track in Paris, France on Wednesday.
Richards’ effort in the cause of T&T and himself fell inches short of the bronze medal, which would have been the country’s first at the prestigious event.
“That was the best I had. That was all. That was everything,” he said.
No one can give more than that for his country and for a cause must surely be the response of all of Trinis who saw the video of the race. Richards fully extended himself physically and mentally towards the end of the gruelling 43-plus seconds of sheer effort.
The technical experts will analyse the race and the approach to it by Richards and the vast majority of us will know that when he took the lead in the approach to the straight run, we felt a medal was in the offing. In the circumstances, and like Richards, we too “laid out all on the track,” shouting our voices to reach him in Paris to urge him on and he did respond by giving it his best.
On the day and in the race, however, three other athletes, including eventual gold medallist, American Quincy Hall, who produced a breath-taking effort of grit and grind, snatched away the medals from Richards.
Like in the immediately past Olympic Games, medal success for T&T has been difficult to come by in France. We must, however, honour a fourth position in one of the blue ribbon events of the Olympic Games as being a great effort. More so, when Richards still established a national record and personal best time of 43.78 seconds for the 400-metre event.
Outside of the physical effort to establish the new national record, what also stands out in Richards’ performance is the unstinting mental effort to perform better than he had previously done. And in doing so, Richards knew that he was placing himself, all his mental and physical energies and capacities in the effort, to register his country and himself amongst the great athletes in the ultimate athletic world games.
In return, the country must also give of itself to Richards. And at this point, without wanting to seem to be ungrateful for the efforts of all our athletes at the Paris Games, it is clear that the sporting associations here, the Ministry of Sport, the athletic clubs and our former great Olympians, need to come together to develop programmes from the primary school level upwards. So too the effort must take in the villages and communities for young people to come to love sports to the point of getting involved in one discipline or the other. It goes almost without saying that there are also non-sports spin-off benefits.
The responsibility is for the creation of a national sporting plan of action to ground the youth and to give them the best chance to become national and international athletes. Undoubtedly, the talent is there. Now needed are the administrative structure and the actual programmes for the youth.
