A costly 'legacy'
Published:Tuesday | December 28, 2010 | 12:00 AM
The Editor, Sir:
The hosting of the ICC Cricket World Cup in 2007 in the West Indies was billed as a great opportunity for Jamaica and the wider English-speaking Caribbean. It was billed as the "Third Largest Sports Event in the World", which was totally false, and bordered on fabrication. The Olympics, FIFA World Cup, and the Commonwealth and Asian Games, to name a few, are all much bigger events.
The cost of construction of the Trelawny stadium, the refurbishing of Sabina Park, security and health services, logistics, etc, cost us a tidy sum, as we spent billions upon billions of taxpayers' dollars to host World Cup Cricket matches in Jamaica.
We were told that the purpose of Jamaica's expenditure on these sports facilities for the ICC Cricket World Cup (CWC) 2007 was to be able to have the capacity to host such future world-class tournaments as this was, as Chris Dehring described it, "the legacy of ICC CWC 2007", in his then capacity as chief executive officer of ICC CWC 2007. "We could also build our nation through sports," was a favourite tag line of Carole Beckford, former columnist on sports tourism in Hospitality Jamaica.
unending bills
The ICC CWC 2007 'legacy' has been the unending bills, which continue to pile up.
1) Have we forgotten the $1.4 billion owed to Ashtrom construction for additional work on Sabina?
2) What about the monthly mounting maintenance bill for the Trelawny multi-purpose facility?
3) Will there be any investigations there? (I'm sure that we taxpayers, and generations to come, will again have to bear that burden!)
I could have foreseen this years ago. Who came up with this plan? Was there any future planning by our administrators? It was as if no one predicted that there would be a cost to maintain these facilities once the World Cup ended. Where was that money to come from?
For all the talk of hosting future cricket tournaments, these stadiums remain underutilised. Jamaica did not even submit a bid to host the ICC Twenty20 World Cup earlier this year to try to earn some dollars from these empty stadiums. But maybe we should thank them for not doing so because that would have cost us more money!
I am, etc.,
Stefan Hemmings