Shameful and embarrassing
An estimated more than 200 of the region’s young and promising athletes who spent the last several months meticulously preparing themselves for the 23rd Caribbean Amateur Boxing Association’s (CABA) tournament are today still pinching themselves trying to determine whether the agony they are experiencing is for real or whether they are in the throes of a nightmare.
Sorry guys. What you are experiencing is real enough. Unfortunately, it’s no nightmare. All your dreams about what you were given to believe would be a truly great tournament here in St. Maarten have come to nought.
The sight of visiting sportsmen and sportswomen – St. Maarten’s guests - languishing on pavements, being turned away from hotels, and having to endure inordinately long periods without meals, was shameful indeed.
It was a man-made disaster, a comedy of blunders, a stunning embarrassment.
It is hard to believe that the people responsible could have been so reckless, so callous, so inept, so amateurish that they have bungled so much and besmirched the good name of this island territory as they let down so many of the region’s young people who, rather than spend their time in lawless and senseless pursuits, devoted so much of their energy and sacrificed so much as they sweated and toiled and even bled in their gruelling preparations for a tournament that was expected to be a launching pad for many boxing careers.
It is difficult to understand how notwithstanding the more that two decades of superintending over the holding of the annual tournament, CABA could have allowed this plight to befall the sport.
We are equally amazed that as a people, we could have found neither the will nor a way; neither the sense of pride nor the resources to rescue the tournament even at the ninth hour and protect St. Maarten’s good name.
We do not profess to be sufficiently knowledgeable about the details of the tournament to ascertain what really went wrong. But about this we are sure: Bobby Ottey’s St. Maarten Amateur Boxing Association/CABA St. Marten 2007 Experience shall long live as a classic example of how not to organise a tournament – any tournament, local, regional or international.
And, while we shall revisit this issue, our hope is that after all the evaluations about what went so awfully wrong are completed and people are held accountable for the shame and embarrassment caused, St. Maarten quickly finds appropriate ways to apologise to the region’s young athletes and to restore its good name.
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