Recently the Trinidad Express ran a story that Ato Boldon will be addressing the United Nations (UN) General Assembly today on the theme “Crime prevention and sustainable development through sports.”

Asked if enough was being done to give young people an attractive alternative, Boldon said ”they trotted out the usual election-year photo ops with sports getting money. Our machine is broken; it does not matter what money sports gets.”

Being a former elite athlete, a coach, having worked closely with the “broken machine” of the National Association of Athletics Administration of TT (NAAA), himself a former senator, his words carry much weight. He’s been there and done that politically speaking.

Why is the UN calling this conference now, with such a high-profile athlete? It is not the first time the UN is addressing matters of sports and national development. Boldon’s fellow Trinidadian, Keith Joseph, head of the Caribbean Association of National Olympic Committees (CANOC) and the North American, Central American and Caribbean Athletics Associations (NACAC), recently addressed a similar UN forum on racism in sport. It did not get the same coverage in local media. Forgive, but our local chairs do not bother themselves with such.

Many other heads of federations are readily available. Boldon is a high-profile media brand and right now the UN is looking anything but good, especially given its relative impotence to handle the Gaza crisis. A temporary distraction? Haiti I’m sorry, but we are focusing on Paris right now.

I do not know how to interpret the topic. Is it the thoroughly discredited notion that sports can solve social problems? In the way there is the notion that if enough “pests” are killed by the police, peace will reign. We have not seen that work in the Caribbean where we have produced elite athletes in just about every discipline.

I always recall the words of a former director of Regional Development Centre/NACAC who reminded me, “Your country has been winning medals at the highest level since Rodney Wilkes’s 1948 silver Olympic medal. In the world of track and field you are considered a developed nation. I suggest that we could say the same concerning criminal activity.”

Maybe we could ask Boldon to tell the UN that the stadium named after him in Couva has been closed to track and field for over five years. The athletes train on the grass opposite the National Cricket Centre. Those of us who exercise in the area see them all the time. How they manage with marked-off areas, without pits for jumps, without areas for throws is beyond comprehension.

Meanwhile just 15 minutes’ drive away is the billion-dollar Brian Lara Cricket Academy which is for showcase events, T20 World Cup and fetes. Yet there are plans to build yet another cricket academy in the East on the site originally earmarked for Pan Trinbago’s headquarters.

As well, he could tell the assembly about the heritage sites of Guaracara Park, JP Schmaltz Velodrome in Palo Seco, the Arima Velodrome, which served as springboards for our athletes in cricket, football, cycling. Hockey has simply been abandoned. Yet the administrations keep building new ones.

As someone who has worked in the three youth correctional facilities in the country, male and female, in orphanages, as someone who was initially involved in the Hoops for Life, as someone who witnessed the debacle of Life Sport, having worked in the youth camps, it becomes clear that good intentions are as good as a $3 bill if the federations and other such agencies are not clear about objectives. Objectives that cannot be reached without involving the staff and management of these places. The Youth Training Centre has an outstanding record of sporting achievements going back decades.

We do not know what Boldon plans to tell the General Assembly that it has not heard before. After all, numerous athletes are goodwill UN ambassadors. Can he go so far as to say that in many countries crime sustains development? Narco-trading, human trafficking, bid rigging for contracts, cost overruns of infrastructure projects.

Are we saying that sporting programmes will fix these social ills? Pray tell.

RAE SAMUEL