By Dr Selwyn R. Cudjoe
December 04, 2024
A week ago I received the following note from Joyce Thomas, a retired VP of a government girl’s college. She has been involved in sports at the Eddie Hart Ground (EHG) as a sprinter and coach over the past 63 years. Joyce is “a level 5 World Athletics Throws coach and has at least 12 athletes on Trinidad Carifta teams. This year Peyton Winter won silver medals in the Carifta Games and gold medals in the NACAC competition last year.”
Joyce Thomas is the past president of the Burnley Athletic Club that was launched in 1952 under Vincent G Ferdinand. George N Clarke, one of the founding members of the club, was one of its most famous coaches. Joyce joined the club in 1957 and became president in 1994. Her athletes have practiced on the EHG for decades. Since 2000 Burnley has had 14 athletes on Trinidad Carifta teams.
T&T must improve its training spaces if it wishes to show better results in international athletics competitions. This is why the athletes, rugby players and cricketers are so alarmed at how the Tunapuna-Piarco Corporation maintains the EHG grounds.
Thomas notes: “Since Independence Day when an event was held on the savannah, the athletic track and throwing areas have been adversely affected with tyre marks from big trucks and rubble to cover up the tracks….The throwing area has suddenly become a car park and a small river runs across it, with water from a tank in the food section settling in some parts. I coach students from San Juan North and South, Bishops East, Trinity East and El Dorado West. Training cannot take place when the rain falls.
“Carifta 2025 is being held in Trinidad and my club Burnley has a few athletes who can challenge for selection. What can I do now to prevent vehicles driving on the throwing area and mashing up the ground? Help!”
The club has produced memorable athletes, including Kent Bernard who was a member of T&T’s 4×400 metre team which won a gold medal at the 1966 Commonwealth Games in Jamaica.
George Swanston, another Burnley-trained athlete, represented T&T at the long jump event in the 1976 Olympic Games. He finished fifth and eighth in the long jump at the 1971 and 1975 Pan American Games respectively. Burnley also produced other world-class athletes such as Thora Best and Keith Swanson.
In November 1841, Andrew Hanswell Green, a New Yorker, came to Tacarigua to work on William Hardin Burnley’s estate as an overseer. He lived “in a shed that was eight-feet-by-eight feet of the main house. The shack had no ‘roof,’ was just shingles placed on across the eaves, frequently exposing Green to the weather.” (New York’s Father Is Murdered).
Green resented the Africans who lived on the plantation. He described them thus: “Once in a state of abject slavery, ruled and governed by their masters, they acquired a servile submission. Now freed by the efforts of the Anti-Slavery Society…they have so great an idea of themselves that they carry their freedom of speech to the most vulgar and obscene impudence.”
He felt the planters were “extremely short-sighted” and were concerned mainly with their immediate self-interest. He planned religious services to improve the condition of the labourers, which they refused to attend. He returned to New York in 1842 by the British ship Humming Bird.
After he left Trinidad, he became the chairman of the New York Board of Education and the controller of the city’s finances. Michael Rubbinaccio wrote: “New Yorkers would not have the American Museum of Natural History, the Bronx Zoo, the New York Public Library, nor the Metropolitan Museum of Art to enjoy and trumpet as items that are quintessentially New York.” William Law Olmsted and Calvin Vaux along with Green were responsible for designing Central Park, where people of all backgrounds could enjoy nature. He was called “The Father of Greater New York.”
I have lived in New York, London, and Paris, where I have enjoyed the beauties of Central Park, Hyde Park, and Jardin du Luxembourg respectively. The leaders of these cities have preserved these parks for the pleasure of their users. They have never sought to make these parks economically profitable for the cities.
Josiah Austin, the chairman of the Tunapuna Piarco Corporation, calls himself “the Make-It-Happen Man.” He sees himself as the boss of everything, while the conditions of the savannah deteriorate every day to the point of which Joyce speaks. It would be nice if he looked at the example of Green, who understood what civil responsibility means.
Given the present trajectory, the savannah may cease to exist as a recreational and sporting space in the next ten years. Nor, for that matter, can we hope to see much improvement in the performance of our athletes in international competitions.