00:00While Trinidad and Tobago is still basking in the success of the recent Karifta Games in Grenada,
00:05which saw the country finishing second on the medal standings for the first time
00:08and with its second-best haul of 55 medals since the 2010 Games,
00:12Head of Tobago Athletics Soren Bishop is pleading with stakeholders in the sister isle
00:16to do more for the sport and athletes in Tobago.
00:19Tobago provided 16 members of the TTO Karifta squad and bagged 11 individual medals.
00:25However, the Tobago athletes are severely disadvantaged without access to the Dwight York Stadium,
00:30an athletic track, proper facilities, and funding.
00:33We definitely need funding, and I will talk about it again, incorporate Tobago.
00:39I'm talking to them first, I'm not talking to the government agency.
00:42The government agency, which is the THA, has to implement policies.
00:48There are policies already there.
00:49The implementation of those policies to ensure that the athletes are taken care of.
00:54As you can see, when Barbados landed back in the airport,
00:58Maya Martin, the Honorable Maya Martin didn't even wait.
01:01She capitalized on the movement, and then she rolled out a plan.
01:04Listen, we are going to put this amount of money into sport development in Barbados.
01:10I think it's the same thing that our government is supposed to do.
01:14Don't just run on the hype, but put things in place so that you could actually see
01:20the fruits of your labor.
01:22And while he's advocating for more Tobago athletes to be included,
01:25he believes TNT should already be putting plans in place to improve on the success.
01:30We should have had more persons on the team.
01:32I was always that.
01:33Tobago should have had more.
01:34Yes, Tobago should have had more persons.
01:35Okay.
01:36But for varying reasons, we can't cry over Spiltnik.
01:39It's a matter of what do we do from here on.
01:41Yes.
01:42While we want to celebrate and we want to do fanfare, we have to understand, listen,
01:48this is not where we should be.
01:50Yeah.
01:50And we're not separating Tobago from Chundan.
01:52No.
01:52But obviously, we...
01:54Yes.
01:54Yes.
01:55Right?
01:55Our problems aren't indigenous and just Tobago.
02:00There's a national problem that I think that we need to go past.
02:04But at the same time, we can't get too ahead of ourselves.
02:06We can see that the association as a whole has been putting things in place and ensuring
02:13that, you know, we make strides and it shouldn't stop at 35 minutes.
02:17Next year, I think we should be very ambitious, start a year in advance with our planning.
02:23Terence Clark, TV6 Sport.
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