The first day of the Olympic Tri­als be­ing host­ed by the Na­tion­al As­so­ci­a­tion of Ath­let­ics Ad­min­is­tra­tion of T&T (NAAATT) has been shift­ed from Sun­day to Mon­day but re­mains at the Hase­ly Craw­ford Sta­di­um in Mu­cu­rapo, Port-of-Spain.

This ac­cord­ing to act­ing pres­i­dent of the NAAATT, George Com­mis­siong said Wednes­day as the un­avail­abil­i­ty and the change in cur­few hours over the week­end by the gov­ern­ment due to the on­go­ing coro­n­avirus (COVID-19) pan­dem­ic, forced the or­gan­is­ing com­mit­tee to de­lay the event by a day. The meet is set to start at 3 pm at the same venue.

Ear­li­er this week, Com­mis­siong con­firmed that his or­gan­i­sa­tion will not be host­ing any track and field Cham­pi­onships and will in­stead hold the two-day Tri­als for the Olympic Games from Ju­ly 23 -Au­gust 8 in Tokyo, Japan. The oth­er day card­ed for the tri­als is June 27 at the same venue.

The NAAATT did, how­ev­er, re­ceive per­mis­sion from the Min­is­ter of Health to host two Olympic tri­als, which will be in­vi­ta­tion­al meets for ath­letes, who may still have a chance of mak­ing the qual­i­fy­ing stan­dards for the Olympics.

The likes of Olympian Ron­del Sor­ril­lo, broth­ers Jonathan and Nathan Far­in­ha, Sha­keem McK­ay, Gen­e­sis Joseph, Do­minic Cole, Ronal­do Moore and Ay­o­dele Taffe will fea­ture among the men and in the women's cat­e­go­ry, Ka­maria Du­rant, reign­ing "Ju­nior Sports­woman of the Year" Shani­qua Bas­combe, Leah Bertrand and Reneisha An­drews will seek out qual­i­fy­ing times.

The last date for the qual­i­fi­ca­tion for the Olympics is on June 29, fol­low­ing which the team will be se­lect­ed in ear­ly Ju­ly and sub­mit­ted to the T&T Olympic Com­mit­tee (TTOC) for rat­i­fi­ca­tion by its coun­cil be­fore the fi­nal sub­mis­sion of en­tries. This is in con­sid­er­a­tion that World Ath­let­ics, will be invit­ing some ath­letes to par­tic­i­pate, by way of ex­am­ple.

Then, he ex­plained: "The cur­rent quo­ta for the hep­tathlon is 24 ath­letes, that is to say, that the or­gan­is­ers want 24 ath­letes to com­pete at the Olympics in that event. Not all of these ath­letes may make the stan­dard. Let’s say 14 ath­letes at­tain the stan­dard then, an ad­di­tion­al 10 ath­letes will be in­vit­ed based on their per­for­mance rank­ings.”

He sin­gled out star mul­ti-sport ath­lete Tyra Git­tens in ex­plain­ing the in­vi­ta­tion process by World Ath­let­ics say­ing: “Our Tyra Git­tens has been hav­ing a won­der­ful year and is cur­rent­ly 23rd on the rank­ings. We ex­pect that Tyra would at­tain the stan­dard but let’s just say she didn’t, then on Ju­ly 1, we should know for sure if she is among those who will be in­vit­ed to com­pete.

“We have al­ready ad­vised TTOC that our team will be sub­mit­ted late on the night of Ju­ly 1 or al­ter­na­tive­ly very ear­ly on the morn­ing of Ju­ly 2. This will al­low suf­fi­cient time for rat­i­fi­ca­tion by the TTOC coun­cil be­fore the fi­nal sub­mis­sion of en­tries.”

On Wednes­day in the Min­istry of Health’s lat­est COVID-19 up­date, T&T re­port­ed 297 new pos­i­tive cas­es and nine ad­di­tion­al deaths in the last 24 hours with an over­all 8,869 ac­tive pos­i­tive cas­es and 695 deaths.