Society
Nationalist sentiment over the Olympics is hypocrisy
Published 02 October 2000
This has been an awful week. Friends slid into death's dateless night. Nasher, one of a small group of mates who moved around together over 30 years, had suddenly contracted cancer. He seemed to be on the mend. He had convinced us he was. He was that kind of fella - never complained, even though, as the doctor told us, he suffered excruciating pain. Then, like a bolt from the blue, Nasher succumbed.
The funeral was tall and mighty. But his death shook me to the bones, threw me into deep contemplation about what this business called life is about.
I was about to receive a double-whammy. Another friend kept calling me on the phone, speaking for up to an hour or so. I had to be diplomatic because I knew, through another source, that he, too, had been diagnosed as suffering with the Big C, which was now spreading through his bones. He avoided the subject, but systematically trawled through our lives with a fine toothcomb.
I had known him from the very beginning of my life in London. We bobbed and weaved, as all life-fulfilling young men do. We have always been in reasonably close contact. There was no need for anything else, or so I thought. Then a long conversation late one night. We said goodbye. He lay down, looked at the ceiling, and said: "Take my life and let it be." He was dead within seconds.
I have been weeping bitterly ever since, feeling a deep sense of life being unfair, cruel, brutal even. And then, as though in solidarity, I broke out in a severe pain that moved around my lower stomach. I found walking and talking difficult. Even the simplest movement caused immense discomfort. Psychosomatic is how I now describe it.
It went as easily as it came. It is no comfort to me that the older one gets, the more frequent these experiences become. The Olympics proved a healing experience. Encouched, I have seen and shared the highs and lows of many champions. The drug cheats will never prevail. In a strange arrangement, the West Indians intervened politically. Merlene Ottey had been suspended for drug offences and, by some miraculous change of heart, her sentence was postponed by the Olympic authorities. The Jamaican athletes organised placards proclaiming "Merlene Ottey Out Out Out". Her colleagues were determined to let the world know that they dissociated themselves from her. It was, for me, one of the finest moments in the Olympics.
Everyone else spoke sotto voce about how a 40-year-old could be competing with the fastest and the best in the youth brigade. The Jamaican athletes cleared this up, once and for all. Caribbeans, whether there or in the English team or elsewhere in the diaspora, are doing rather well. Young Ato Bolden won a silver medal in the 100 metres and is expected to win a gold medal in the 200 metres.
Ato Bolden's aunt once boarded under the watchful eye of my mother at our house in Port of Spain. I recall this for two simple reasons. First, in these small islands, fame and fortune can favour the little boy next door, the kid on the block, making available to many the possibility of developing a life-enhancing talent. Second, any form of nationalist sentiment attached to these victories is pure, unadulterated hypocrisy.
All of these successful Caribbean athletes have shown some talent at home, and then gone to the US. Fifty years ago, Arthur Wint and that team of quarter-milers burst upon the athletic scene. Since then, we have had gold and silver medallists, and yet another band of athletes battling their way to fame. Caribbean governments have refused to provide facilities where these kids can develop at home. Only recently, the prime minister of Trinidad and Tobago spent US$27m promoting Donald Trump's Miss World contest, while men and women from the islands lack proper sporting facilities.
In the midst of trouble and pain, there were moments of joy. Aboriginal athlete Kathy Freeman almost took the roof off the stadium, as she summoned all her energies in the 400 metres. Second to her was a Jamaican. Good enough for me.
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