Chief sec tours Commonwealth Youth Games venue; Courland beach sport arena opened

WITH mere hours to go before the opening of the Commonwealth Youth Games, the ribbon was cut to herald the readiness of the Courland Beach Sport Arena in Tobago, while will host the Games' beach volleyball.

Speaking at the commissioning ceremony on Thursday, THA Chief Secretary Farley Augustine said he is grateful to have reached this point.

“This experience – 40 days and 40 nights for this and that to be done – might be prophetically and spiritually symbolic. But this experience has taught that more than where there is a will there is a way, but also that once God is in the picture, it will happen. As we say, God will help us.”

Tobago is expected to host four sporting disciplines in the Games which opens on Friday. Beach volleyball was initially set to be held at Pigeon Point Beach, but in April, the assembly opted for a facility in Courland.

Previously, Sport Minister Shamfa Cudjoe said she was worried that the Courland facility would not be ready in time. In the first instance, sand for the facility only arrived from Guyana on Sunday. She said the THA told her it would be shipped from Guyana around 1 am on Saturday and arrive on Sunday by 2 am. In a Facebook post on Sunday, she said the sand finally arrived, adding: "Better late than..."

Addressing attendees, Augustine also had a special thanks for the ministry.

“Thank you Ministry of Sport, for the things that you have given towards the Commonwealth Youth Games which begins with the opening ceremony tomorrow (Friday) and the games (being held) this weekend.”

He added: “We talk about collaboration and what it really means, and yes sometimes they say and do some things that might be annoying, and it might just come from a place of not understanding the Tobago space and what is happening in the Tobago space.”

He said although there wasn’t a buy-in to build a new facility for this particular international sporting event, some of the implements that would be seen during the event was paid for by the ministry.

“The bleachers you see, the portable toilets and so on – they (the ministry) paid for those things. Some of the implements needed for the games, they paid for those,” Augustine said.

He said what the THA took on was all of the infrastructural work.

“We said, this is Tobago's business, this is our land, this is our facilities that were left unkempt for a while and we are going to fix them. So we put our monies where our mouths were, put our resources behind it, put our workers behind it and got it done.”