Olympian calls for support system for student athletes abroad

An Olympic athlete turned sports tourism organiser has backed a structured support system for young athletes studying overseas, warning that many are dropping out of college due to mounting academic and personal pressures without adequate guidance.

Stevon Roberts highlighted that several  of this nation’s gifted athletes have dropped out of college over the years because of a lack of guidance while navigating the stresses of overseas education. To address this, he proposed the creation of a specialised club designed to provide the necessary mentorship and support for these students.

Roberts ran in the men’s 800 metres and was also part of Barbados’s men’s 4 × 400 metres relay team at the 1992 Barcelona games. 

Consultant Stevon Roberts said that sports tourism would prove beneficial for the island’s economy. (Photo Credit: Jenique Blegrave/Barbados TODAY

“One of the things that I have done to help with sports tourism is I have approached the government recently on starting what we call a Big Brother club or a company for children of talent, because what you are getting is a lot of Barbadian athletes that go overseas and are not graduating and it’s not their fault,” he said.

Roberts noted the demands placed on students with sports scholarships, saying that most were required to train every day, attend school and maintain grades at a certain level or risk not being able to compete and losing their grant.

“I recently advised a youngster who came home. He was on scholarship and he couldn’t handle the work and he wanted to give up and his parents did not know what to do. Sometimes children don’t only want to talk to their parents. They want to talk to somebody that went through it and that  they can be open and honest, because sometimes they’re afraid to talk to their parents through failure. If you see your child struggling, don’t be afraid to reach out to somebody,” he said.

Addressing the Barbados Labour Party’s St Michael West Central branch meeting on Sunday at the Lawrence T Gay Memorial Primary School, he told parents to encourage their children to play sports, stressing that there were significant benefits to excelling in such activities, as their success could be transformative for their entire family.

Highlighting the benefits of sports tourism, including the positive impact on the economy through visitor spending at hotels and other accommodation, restaurants, vendors, activities, supermarkets and other businesses, he said the sector was a multibillion-dollar industry and that, while Barbados had previously appeared uninterested, it was now recognising the benefits and steadily moving to tap into them.

“The World Trade Organisation is anticipating that sports tourism will contribute to 10 percent of the world’s tourism and that’s massive. We are talking about $842bn every year, just in sports. For many years, we have used cricket as our main means of sports tourism but as a former athlete I always used to think that Barbados used to make sport at sports because we never really tapped into what money could be made from sports. 

“One of the things you really need to make serious money from sports tourism is to have the facility. So the Barbados government has gone and invested heavily into a new stadium and we are actually building a multi-sports facility next to the stadium as well. We spent $25m at Kensington Oval and there are other things that are going to be going up on the land at the gymnasium to contribute to sports tourism.”

Roberts, who spearheaded last year’s Caribbean motor racing festival, said it generated $3m in tourism spending and pointed out that 80 cars have already signed up for this year’s “whole family” event, which will take place in November.

(JB)