Officials blame deficient programmes, facilities for sport’s fall-off

By Kimberley Cummins

Cycling in Barbados is crying out for assistance. So says Livingstone Headley, manager of the Barbados cycling team that competed at the just concluded Commonwealth Games in England. He believes that possible sprint talents are “going through the eddoes” because of an inadequate facility to train. However, top trainer Colin Forde disagrees, suggesting that proper development programmes are more necessary at this point.

In an interview with Barbados TODAY, Headley lamented the inadequacies of the outdated velodrome at the now condemned National Stadium. Firstly, it is a 500-metre track which is not used internationally anymore and have long been replaced by 250 metres. Secondly, it is outdoors and concrete when most tracks are now indoors and wooden.

“What we have at the stadium is concrete, concrete is going to be slower than wood because you get more friction on concrete than on wood. And then because it is 500 it is spread out more than if it was 250 which have higher bankings which means the cyclist moves off faster because they gain speed by going up on the bankings and dropping down. You use the bankings to gain speed but on a 500 the bankings are so shallow that you can’t really do that. The track is so big that when you do four laps on the other one it is like two laps on this one. So, you can’t train anybody on a 500-metre track to go and race on a 250 track, it just wouldn’t work,” he explained.

 

Barbados has three main sprinters, Amber Joseph and Jamol Eastmond, who represented the island at the Commonwealth Games, and Edwin Sutherland. All three cyclists are based overseas.

Headley, who is also vice-president of the Barbados Cycling Union (BCU), believed that the lack of facilities is a direct correlation to the dearth of cyclists being produced and/or transitioning to the elite level. He said that while the current velodrome at the stadium is useful for the up-and-coming youngsters to practise, it is inadequate if they want to seriously get to the level of competition.

On the other hand, Forde, who is the father and former coach of Barbados’ most decorated cyclist Barry Forde, said that the dwindling pool of talent Barbados has to choose from is a blaring consequence of deficient developmental programmes. And he charged it was a shame that a country which was accustomed to having over 75 to 100 riders, all who had to compete to make a team, now only has three sprint riders.

On top of that, he said things were so bad that Barbados couldn’t even muster a single rider to send to the recent under-23 games in Guadeloupe. Forde acknowledged that the current track might not be ideal right now for the country’s elite riders for competitions, and at some point, the country will need to upgrade to a 250 or 335 track, but he stressed it is still a track that can be used to foster developmental programmes to bring young talents to junior level.

He continued: “Everybody would want to blame the unavailability of a track but that is not all we want. . . . I try to stay away from the politics of cycling because everybody got their own excuse why they are not producing cyclists but if you ain’t got a junior rider, if you ain’t got an under-23 rider, you going to blame not having a 250 track for that? That is just like telling the AAA you can’t produce CARIFTA athletes unless you have a track. The AAA has done well this season without having a track with CARIFTA athletes.

“I don’t think if we get a stadium overnight or whatever the case may be, we will automatically produce great athletes because we had a good stadium and we had issues. We had a stadium from since 1972 and our stadium was in immaculate condition and only fall apart say the last ten years and outside of that we were only able to win in 1998. We won three medals Barry won a bronze, Oba [Obadele Thompson] a bronze and Andrea Blackett won a gold. Since then, we have never really been dominant. We had one or two, a boxer Junior Greenidge and Ryan Brathwaite . . . but outside of that we ain’t had no real [winners] until now. Bear in mind, all of those athletes were overseas-based like the ones they had before that were winning medals even when we had a stadium,” he said.

Forde added: “Yes, a stadium is important, but I don’t think, in my opinion, it is not the main source of having our athletes at elite level. What happen with the netballers? We ain’t got the gymnasium there? A more refined, refurbished gymnasium? They lack facilities? And if you even want to get way ridiculous now what happen to our cricketers? We got all the facilities; we got the mecca here and we could only win one game. It comes down to developmental programmes. You can have 100 cyclists, if you don’t have the right programmes in place to take them where they want to go it ain’t going to make much difference,” Forde added.