media_artricles :: 2017

How sweet it is!

This is what global sporting success does for us.

Of course yesterday's magnificent triumph in the men's 4 x 400-metre relay final at the World Athletics Championships in London doesn't solve any of our many problems.

Tobagonians are still awaiting a reliable ferry service and we are no closer to anything resembling a satisfactory resolution to – as the persevering Afra Raymond has deemed it – the greatest fraud perpetrated on the people of this country in the shape of the government's financial rescue of Clico and CL Financial.

People still being murdered left, right and centre while bandits of all varieties (aimless young men with guns and scheming jackets and ties in luxury vehicles) commit crimes with impunity. So what are we celebrating?

Well, this momentary surge of joy and patriotism is at seeing our own excel at the very highest level of their profession, a level that has the attention of hundreds of millions, maybe even billions, right around the world. It is one thing to boast about being the best in the world at pursuits that are essentially indigenous. It is entirely another when those we identify as our own, with all our frailties, fickleness and don't-care-damn indifference to everything except a good fete, beat the best of the best at their own game.

And that's what the quartet of Jarrin Solomon, Jereem Richards, Machel Cedenio and Lalonde Gordon did yesterday to bring the curtain down on the competition at the Olympic Stadium, the same venue where Keshorn Walcott stunned the sporting world on the penultimate day of the 2012 Olympics, the then 19-year-old hurling the javelin 84.58 metres to claim just this nation's second gold on sport's greatest stage at the same time that raging flood waters were causing significant devastation in Diego Martin.

On Saturday, the maturing Walcott managed a best effort just ten centimetres shy of that winning standard but could only finish seventh, a reflection of how difficult it is to be consistently successful at elite-level sport. Just minutes after Walcott, also a bronze medallist from last year's Rio Olympics, was leaving the venue a disappointed man, Trinidad and Tobago's women's sprint relay quartet could only manage sixth in their final, prompting Kelly-Anne Baptiste's plea for more relay preparation time in seasoned reporter Kwame Laurence's story headlined "CRY FOR HELP" in these pages yesterday.

It looked as if we would be eating up ourselves this morning over yet another round of what-ifs and if-onlys, trying desperately on the one hand to console ourselves that the misery and bad luck endured by the departing Usain Bolt and Jamaica at this meet merely are circumstances with which we have come depressingly accustomed to over many decades and many Olympics and World Championships.

On the other hand there is the argument that we have an inflated opinion of ourselves and our abilities in the international arena, that all the explanations and rationales are merely pitiful excuses for the lack of whatever constitutes that extra edge which earns those extra centimetres, those marginally faster times and the vital goal that turns an elusive dream of World Cup football glory into disbelieving reality.

But it's 5.09 p.m. and there they are at the top of the podium: Solomon who set the pace, 200-metre bronze medallist Richards who ran a storming second leg, Cedenio who put aside his struggles of a difficult season to hand off with gold tantalisingly close, and Gordon, the pride and joy of Lowlands, Tobago, bronze medallist in both the individual one-lap and relay at the 2012 Olympics at the same venue, who waited and waited on the shoulder of American anchor man Fred Kerley and timed his surge to perfection down the home stretch to earn the red, black and white our first-ever relay gold at any Olympics or World Championships.

Am I hearing someone saying that the new ferry, whenever it arrives, should be christened the "Lalonde Gordon?"

And the success was no fluke. How could it be with a world-leading time for 2017 of 2:58.12 and with the United States and bronze medallists Great Britian and Northern Ireland also producing their best efforts of the year? They were silver medallists at the last World Championships two years ago in Beijing but even that information, together with their ease of qualification in the heats on Saturday, would have been grist for the mill among the sceptics – of whom I must admit to being one – who hold that, for whatever reason, we lack that extra bit of something to deliver when it really matters.

But the refrain of "Forged from the love of liberty..." is wafting through the night air in London and this is no Trickidadian forgery. It's real. It's gold, and for just this little glorious while, we are on top of the world.

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