Jamaican Chadwick Walton and countrywoman and badminton star Katherine Wynter were named Sportsman and Sportswoman of the Year 2016 at Wednesday’s inaugural RBC Royal Bank sponsored University of the West Indies (UWI) Vice-Chancellors Sports Awards.
Held at the Daaga Auditorium, St Augustine Campus, UWI, Walton, 30, a right-handed West Indies batsman and wicketkeeper won favour with the panel to beat out Barbados athletics star Fallon Forde, Jamaican cricketer Rovman Powell and T&T Taekwondo champion Edson Breedy.
Wynter, meanwhile, copped the award over St Lucians Abigail Fedee and Nerissa Augustin for netball, and T&T’s Avoni Seymour in the sport of volleyball. Under the banner of the university’s four campuses: Cave Hill, Mona, Open and St Augustine, eight athletes were shortlisted.
Walton and Forde represented Cave Hill, while Wynter and Powell were the Mona Campus champions. Fedee and Augustin flew the flag of the Open Campus, while Seymour and Breedy led the charge for the team St Augustine.
Four special awards were bestowed on the night. The recipients were: West Indies test captain Jason Holder, his teammate Jason Holder, female cricketer Deandra Dottin and 2013 World Athletics Championships 400m hurdle winner Jehue Gordon.
But originators of the awards concept did not base the prize on athleticism alone. The excellence displayed by athletes during competition had to be replicated in the classroom, too.
Walton, in his rise to become the UWI Vice-Chancellor’s Sportsman of the Year was best able epitomise these qualities. In his pursuit of a Masters in Sport Science, with a first degree was in accounting, he served as captain of the UWI Blackbirds cricket team and he led the team to capture all three titles in the Barbados Cricket Association’s elite division in 2015. Walton’s duties on the field also included the West Indies A team, the West Indies Senior team and the Jamaica Tallawahs, none of which disrupted his academic progress.
Staying true to her academic pursuits did not deny Wynter gold and bronze medals at the recently held Jamaica International Badminton Tournament, either.
Professor Sir Hilary Beckles, said, each morning when he looked at a photograph of Usain Bolt and Kelly-Ann Fraser-Pryce, he wondered why “students had to choose…students with natural athletic ability. Why should they have to choose as to whether they should pursue their God given talent or to go off to college? Why not do both? When I was 17 years old, I have the option of being a professional cricketer or going off to college. And, I had two letters in my hands: an acceptance letter to a university and an offer to be a professional cricketer.
It was a very difficult decision to make, but I chose to go off to college. I have been a frustrated cricketer ever since, because the fact is, it has been my sole ambition in life to play cricket for the WI.”
Lamenting seeing too many young people forced to make that difficult choice, he declared that the UWI had stepped up to offer young people in the Caribbean and opportunity to do both simultaneously.
“We love Jehue (Gordon). We celebrated his phenomenal achievement. We all jump off our sofas and said that’s a UWI man. When Jason Holder led the WI test team out on the field, we all said yes! That’s a UWI student.
It is true that when Carlos Brathwaite struck those four consecutive sixes and the whole Caribbean jumped for joy, the UWI fraternity jumped even higher, because he was the university’s cricket captain. We are citizens of a civilisation that is rich and over blessed with sporting talent.
In fact, no other civilisation in the world has produced as many brilliant international sportsmen and sportswomen per capita than the Caribbean. It is a phenomenal achievement which we must never take for granted,” said Sir Hilary.
He continued, “But all the time we have taken it for granted. Who could not have imaged 20 years ago, that the WI as a test team would be a lowly test team? It was beyond our imagination.
“I have asked the Jamaican community to imagine 20 years from today a Jamaican unable to attain a medal in the Olympic 100-metres. Right now that is beyond their imagination, but these things do happen and when they do, we have to ask the question: who should be held responsible? Who should be held accountable when a society losses excellence? My discipline is economic history and I know that the Swiss have been making the finest time pieces for 600 hundred years: en entire civilisation mobilised ensuring that excellence, once achieved is never lost.”