Confidence vindicated!

"The fact is that, despite the low medal tally, we had a very talented squad of athletes in Rhodes including some potentially outstanding youngsters who deserve everybody’s support. Whilst it is inevitable that not all of the youngsters will maintain their improvement through to the next Games I am confident that most of them will. Even more importantly in terms of winning medals, we already have a quality core of senior athletes who will still be very much around and very competitive in 2009, with some former medallists possibly on the comeback trail as well and challenging for places. In short, I think there is every reason to believe that we will do very well in Aland in 2009. Not every team member will win a medal of course, but we will be stronger than we were in Rhodes and there will be more competition for places. Let’s give the team the support and encouragement they deserve!"


The above paragraph was posted by me on the www.manxathletics.com forum in the autumn of 2007. There had been some criticism of the performance of the Isle of Man team as a whole in the 2007 Island Games, and there was a lot of debate on the forum about the athletics team's performances and selection policy after winning 5 medals in Rhodes - a much lower tally than we had been used to. I argued strongly in support for the team at the time as it was clear to me that the team had great potential for the future, and the passage quoted above was the final paragraph of quite a long submission.

You would have to say that pretty much everything I said in that paragraph has been fully vindicated by the performance of the team in Aland, which is a great credit both to the athletes themselves and to the management team who remained strong in their conviction that their policies for the future success of the team were correct. The athletics team were fortunate to have the support of Andy Fox, Di Shimell and Andy Watson in Aland, and I doubt if any island has a better or more professional management team. I firmly believe that we will be even more successful in 2011.