Paul Wright | Sports, slavery and second-rate administrators

History will record that it was sometime in the 1940s that the world began to realise the extraordinary talent that Jamaicans have for sports.

The early pioneers, Arthur Wint, Herb McKenley et al, prompted experts from around the globe to try to figure out what made Jamaican sportsmen and women so great.

I am a believer in the genetic theory that postulates that the slave trade that resulted in captured warriors and other Africans being sold to men with ships and transported across the Atlantic Ocean in the worse possible conditions, resulted in some of these men and women physically protesting their fate.

As a result of their ‘behaviour’, the ‘rebels’ were the first to be unloaded at the first sight of land: Jamaica.

Here, in an attempt to ensure that these slaves were strong and capable of the non-stop work required on the plantations, the strongest and fittest men and women were selectively paired and forced to produce offspring that were capable of continuing the demands of the work without the owners having to be constantly buying new slaves.

Through the years, we Jamaicans, (and to a lesser extent West Indians, whose ancestors also shared in that Middle Passage), have shown that in sports, once you show us how to play the game, eventually, the world would see and be amazed at our athleticism.

So it was in cricket, so it is in track and field.

In track and field, our stars were enticed to foreign shores where their athletic superiority enabled colleges and clubs to dominate in their events. Then along came Stephen Francis and Glen Mills, who proved that our stars did not need to go abroad to continue to dominate. They could stay here and train and become even greater.

‘WITH SUCCESS COMES ENVY AND BAD MIND’

In cricket, once a West Indian learnt the game and was able to hone his craft against those who had mastered the game, we were unbeatable for year after year. But with success comes envy and bad mind.

Administrators, some who played and some who never played or participated in the sport at a high level, saw a way to become famous and financially comfortable by convincing those who play that it was the administrators who could decide if you made it in sport.

Rules and entry criteria were adjusted so that only those who bowed and scraped to the administrators would get a chance to enthral the world with their skill and expertise. Thus began the decline.

Team sports were the main sufferers, but even in track and field, where your individual performance screamed for attention, rules and entry criteria were sometimes used to deny potential greats from becoming just that: great.

In cricket, our men gradually slipped down the totem pole of world ranking until we were forced to qualify for the World Cup by playing against the ‘just come’ to world cricket.

Now, in women’s football, two men – Jamaica Football Federation President Michael Ricketts and his General Secretary, Dalton Wint – with the financial support of Cedella Marley, were allowed to assemble and hone a group of young women to the pinnacle of football, the World Cup.

All they needed, all they craved was support. Support from us, we the people (which they got), but also from (need I say it) the administrators. That support was not to be.

Trips had to be promised and delivered; funding that was promised could not be obtained; and so ‘promise them something, but don’t pay them … yet’ became the play of the day. So, the dream died.

The architects of success were removed and Wint boldly proclaimed that, essentially, “a nuh nutten”.

So, on to the Olympic Qualifiers. Practice was pooh-poohed (lack of funds), and a new coaching team was put in place. The result, a most humiliating and abject display of non-football that resulted in a 9-0 defeat last week to Canada. What we reap is what we sow. What next?

Dr Paul Wright is a radio personality and sports medicine specialist.