$1m for Olympic gold

ONE million dollars will be given to any national winning an Olympic gold medal, with half-million dollars for silver and quarter million for bronze, Planning Minister Camille Robinson-Regis told a People’s National Movement (PNM) rally at Diamond Vale, Diego Martin on Thursday. Medallists at World Championship Games will receive $500,000 (gold), $250,000 (silver) and $150,000 (bronze), she added.

The minister said junior athletes and paralympians will also get awards, unspecified, under an incentives and rewards framework in the Government’s National Sport Policy, recently laid in the House of Representatives. As if mulling her athletic prowess, she then joked, “So in the next four years, I’ll be a millionaire.”

She said the framework will eliminate ambiguity and inequity in sport/athletic awards. “So it will no longer be a guessing game.”

Robinson-Regis announced that the Sport Company of TT is to be renamed the Sport Commission, to give it a more business focus for sport development.

Otherwise she hit the Opposition for now purportedly supporting former education minister Hazel Manning in the ongoing blame game over the late opening of the Vieux Fort apartments, when previously the Opposition had criticised the ministerial tenure of Manning and her husband, former prime minister the late Patrick Manning.

The minister said Prime Minister Dr Keith Rowley had never blamed Mr Manning, as he had not been housing minister – a post held by Emily Gaynor Dick-Forde.

Robinson-Regis alleged huge overpayment to buy/develop plots of land under the former People’s Partnership government. Some $175 million was paid for Eden Gardens, valued at $35 million, while Cypress Gardens was valued at $500 million but bought for $1.6 billion.

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