At the 1992 Barcelona Games, Ato Boldon did not enjoy the Olympic debut he had anticipated. Just 18 at the time, Boldon exited in the opening round of the 100 metres event, and suffered the same fate in the 200. The double blow was cushioned, however, by a 30-year-old teammate.
"My greatest memory of Barcelona is how much Ian Morris took me under his wing. I love Ian today like a bigger brother because there I was, the young hotshot getting all the headlines, and nobody knew who I was. I was the imported one, a lot like how (Jamaica's) Briana Williams is now. And I went there and flamed out.
"The Guardian wrote the headline: 'Boldon flatters to deceive'. That is one of the most important headlines in my career. It said to me if you start to believe your own hype, that's the end of you. And these Trinbagonians will run the bus over you, and back it up twice, three, four times."
Boldon was speaking during a recent edition of the online series, "Athlete Talks". The show was co-hosted by 2017 World Championship 200m bronze medallist Jereem "The Dream" Richards and retired half-miler Jamaal James.
"It's almost right at that point," Boldon continued, "I decided whatever Trinidad and Tobago think, what the people down there think, cannot be your motivation. And you can't get so high and so low that you're so devastated when things go badly. So, I remember how much Ian Morris took me under his wing. He's a lot of the reason why I was able to bounce back for World Juniors."
The highpoint for T&T at the Barcelona Olympics was Morris' fourth place finish in the men's 400m final. In the 4x400m championship race, the T&T quartet of Alvin Daniel, Patrick Delice, Neil De Silva and Morris finished fourth. And cyclist Gene Samuel was eighth in the men's kilometre time trial. Eight years earlier, at the Los Angeles Olympics, Samuel finished fourth in the same event.
Boldon left Barcelona in August, but was back on a plane in September, heading to the fourth IAAF World Junior Championships.
"I trained as though my life depended on it. When I showed up to Seoul, South Korea, I felt like what happened in Barcelona was my wake up call, and I only need one wake up call."
Boldon was on fire in Seoul, capturing the men's sprint double for T&T.
"World Juniors was real dominance for me, and of course the reward was being the first to do the double. Back home, a lot of people were saying maybe he was a little overwhelmed as a youth being in the Olympic Games for the first time. It was a little bit of a learning curve. I went in there kind of undertrained and overconfident. But at World Juniors, I righted the ship. That was the real me.
"In 1992," Boldon continued, "we had gone 16 years without an Olympic medal. Ian had gotten close; Gene had gotten close. But it wasn't like we were killing it on the circuit. Track and field was an afterthought. It was really about the Strike Squad 1990 and all of that hype. Track and field was forgotten."
World Juniors double gold, however, signalled the start of a new era in T&T sport.
"The thing I'm most proud of is that when I show up, Trinbagonians were sort of forced to take the focus away from football and cricket being everything in the sports pages, and saying hey, we're going to start to look at track and field. And that's what Kwame Laurence from the Express did. I taught him what I knew about the sport, and he taught his readers.
"You think you could have said anything about sub-10 and sub-20 in 1992 and anybody knew what you're talking about? No. But everybody knows that now because Ato ran a sub-10 or Ato ran a sub-20. We had to educate a population. Trinidad and Tobago at that time, we weren't really checking for track and field," Boldon ended, "in the way that it changed after."
