TT’s middleweight refugee policy

THE TRIUMPHS and tribulations of sportsmen competing at the Tokyo Olympics continue to play out in front of the world, and here in TT focus now turns to athletics, where there are hopes our team can race to the podium.

But while figures like TT athletes Keshorn Walcott, Richard Thompson, Michelle-Lee Ahye and five-time Olympian Kelly-Ann Baptiste will feel the pride and pressure that comes with representing their homeland, there are some competing in this edition of the Olympics who have no real homeland to speak of.

One of them is Eldric Sella, 24, a middleweight boxer from Venezuela who trained in TT for years, since coming here seeking asylum in 2018.

Sr Sella qualified for the Olympics, but his stint in Tokyo was short-lived. He was knocked down 15 seconds into his fight with the Dominican Republic’s Euri Cedeno Martinez on Monday. It was the end of a childhood dream.

That dream had sustained Sr Sella as he worked for years, taking on odd jobs to survive as he continued to hone his boxing skills on the off-chance he could find a way to qualify for an Olympic team.

“When I was mixing concrete, I was thinking how that would help me in my boxing career,” Sr Sella said in an interview in June. “When I was cutting grass, I was thinking how that will help me in my boxing career. When I was painting a house, or whatever I was doing, I always had in my mind what I wanted to do.”

The grit, determination and perseverance paid off when he qualified as a member of the Refugee Olympic Team.

This is only the second time in history that there has been a refugee team at the Olympics. The first time was in 2016, at the Summer Olympic Games in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Back then, there were only ten members. This year the team has tripled in size to 26 as the world’s crises continue to generate more and more stateless people.

While Sella had been living and working in TT up to last week, local authorities have shown little enthusiasm for his situation. He will not be able to return to TT. Authorities have now imposed a visa requirement for all Venezuelans, which they say would bar his re-entry to TT.

Onlookers speculate that the uncertainties relating to his status, as well as the last-minute nature of his trip to Tokyo to compete amid the TT bureaucratic limbo, may have factored into Sr Sella’s performance, in the end robbing him of the very dream he had worked so hard to achieve.

What this young dreamer’s case does demonstrate, however, is the crushing, real-world effects of TT’s arbitrary position on refugees.