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How many major sporting venues in this country can you come up with off the top of your head?
Here’s my automatic list: Hasely Crawford Stadium, Ato Boldon Stadium, Larry Gomes Stadium, Manny Ramjohn Stadium, Dwight Yorke Stadium, Arima Velodrome, Skinner Park, Guaracara Park, Shaw Park, National Racquet Centre, National Aquatic Centre, National Velodrome… and of course, the Jean Pierre Complex.
Yes, the Complex, completed in 1979 in time for the hosting of the Netball World Championships that year but which we are now being told is structurally unsafe so will be torn down and rebuilt. Will the Hasely Crawford Stadium suffer a similar fate, seeing that it was completed just a couple years after the Complex as part of what was then known as the West Port of Spain Regional Park?
By the way, I am sure I have omitted quite a few other major sporting venues but the point is there are so many of them for such a small space. And it seems every time there is an election to be won or a global or regional event we would like to host we put up one or two more.
There are at least two issues here. Firstly, are all these necessary? This is a question asked many times for quite a few decades and there never has been a proper answer, because apart from the fundamental issue of ensuring maximum utility we also have the emotion that comes with regional loyalties and feelings of discrimination. So if I were to say that the Brian Lara Stadium was an unnecessary and extremely expensive vanity project and that the more than one billion dollars could have been better used to upgrade existing facilities in the southland, I can expect to be accused, especially as a member of the Queen’s Park Cricket Club, of north-based arrogance and elitism and behaving just like the Port of Spain hoity-toities who only venture past the lighthouse to get to the airport.
Yet, even if all of these facilities were fully justified, there is the second concern relating to the maintenance of these structures. Obviously this doesn’t apply only to sporting venues, but if we were to stop and think about this culture of neglect which ignores the cost-saving and life-prolonging benefits of such a continuous exercise, wouldn’t it at least make sense to pause ahead of the next mega-project and contemplate on the potential benefits of a comprehensive maintenance regime?
It has to be part of the curse of plenty that we really see no value in maintaining our public buildings and all its attendant facilities up to a particular standard. For at least a generation, our attitude has been to just build a new one or wait until it is so deteriorated to spend five times more money refurbishing… only to repeat the process five, ten or 20 years down the road and then waste even more money.
Ironically, most of us would never allow that to happen at home. No sir, from the gutterings to the trees in the yard to the drains inside and outside, there is work to be done almost every weekend and a project manager/maintenance supervisor (also known as a wife) ensuring that the work is done up to mark.
All joke aside though, most of us take pride in our personal spaces, however humble or opulent they may be, but we can’t seem to transfer that same level of care and concern to structures which don’t directly belong to us.
However the reality is that they do belong to us. It’s just that we are distressingly deficient in the level of civic-mindedness (and I am not talking flag-waving patriotism here) which would promote a level of pride and concern for everything around us, from the welfare of our fellow citizens to the state of our public services, roads, buildings and yes, our sporting facilities great and small.
I was fortunate to have attended games at those 1979 World Netball Championships and a couple of the opening fixtures at then National Stadium (a game between an ASL All Star team and Zico’s Brazilian champions Flamengo in 1982 comes immediately to mind) and recall the sense of pride that we had such world-class facilities right here.
But I also remember that even as crowds were flocking to the Stadium the adjacent Complex was already suffering from neglect, inside and outside. If it wasn’t the gymnasium floor rotting because the Complex designers didn’t factor in the angle of rainfall which rendered the open-air plan a complete disaster it was the plastic outdoor seating crumbling like dry biscuit and the chevron courts being left to deteriorate.
And so, like a washing machine cycle, we are about to do it again. Really, when will we grow up as a people?
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How many major sporting venues in this country can you come up with off the top of your head?
Here’s my automatic list: Hasely Crawford Stadium, Ato Boldon Stadium, Larry Gomes Stadium, Manny Ramjohn Stadium, Dwight Yorke Stadium, Arima Velodrome, Skinner Park, Guaracara Park, Shaw Park, National Racquet Centre, National Aquatic Centre, National Velodrome… and of course, the Jean Pierre Complex.
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