A National Holiday for Every Caribbean Olympic Gold Winner is Simply Senseless!

Frankly speaking, while the overwhelming over-enthusiasm behind loud calls across the Caribbean for Governments of nations whose athletes won Olympic Gold medals to declare public holidays in their honour is understandable, it also overly underestimates the reality that not or not-enough thought was given to what’s actually being asked for.

Fact is, most calling for ‘a holiday’ to honour  Julien Alfred’s two magnificent (Gold and Silver) Olympic Medal wins hardly know, or care, how holidays are declared, or by whom.

Every country has two sets of holidays – one designated Public or National Holidays and the other as religious Holy Days.

However, Saint Lucia already has over-a-dozen such holidays – so many that investors with labour-intensive operations (like in call centres) complain about possibly having to pay for over-a-dozen working days for work-not-done, some also requiring workers’ presence on local holidays to serve overseas clientele.

Saint Lucia has long-exceeded its usual average quota of holidays, having had to de-recognize The Queen’s Birthday many years after Independence Day on February 22,1979 – to make that date a national holiday.

A similar situation still exists with independent nations and republics awarding Knighthoods to nationals who served The Crown well-enough during and after colonialism, leading to creation of national awards of similar and higher national stature (like the Saint Lucia Cross), as numbers of persons deserving honours increase yearly.

But while it’s easy to call for ‘a holiday for Julien Alfred’, hardly anyone has explained what is to be done and where to begin, why and how it will benefit the star athlete and the nation, of when it should be – an annual Julien Alfred Day permanently inscribed on the calendar of national holidays, or a one-off, one-day holiday?

Whatever, just think of it: If Julien succeeds in encouraging hundreds of young Saint Lucians to emulate her (as well as Leverne Spencer and Janelle Scheper) to reach every talented athlete’s ultimate dream of qualifying for The Olympic Games and start bringing Olympic Gold home as early as 2028 – and every four years thereafter – will it make sense to grant another new national holiday for each?

Much can be done to honour global sports achievers, but even with best intentions, pressuring governments to declare holidays for Olympic Gold Medal winners is simply unwise.

Any new national holiday will most-likely have to replace an existing one – and each will draw complaints or protests, including December 13 in Saint Lucia, a date rooted in a historical lie.

Saint Lucians observed December 13 initially as ‘Discovery Day’ (from Time Immemorial), as a day to ‘celebrate’ Christopher Columbus having ‘discovered’ the island during his second voyage in 1493, even if he never landed.

Other conflicting claims include that Spanish explorer and cartographer Juan de la Costa had included the island on his maps in 1499; and another is that it’s also included on a globe at the Vatican made in 1502.

Yet, Columbus’ own diaries defy his claim to have ‘seen’ the island on Saint Lucy’s Day, the feast of the Christian Patron Saint of the Blind, placing him closer to South America, in search of the elusive land of gold called El Dorado.

Colonial historians completely erased the indigenous First People, the natives Columbus and others erased from their own lands, in the name of God and under the Papal Bull called ‘Doctrine of Necessity’, as imperial kingdoms and queendoms fought over the new worlds to conquer through native genocide.

But be all that as it may, Caribbean people’s absolute love for holidays has ensured that 46 years after its Independence, December 13 is still observed as an annual national holiday in Saint Lucia – now upgraded to ‘National Day’ status and elevating Saint Lucia to being the only nation in the world with an Independence Day and a National Day that aren’t the same.

Nobody seems to care either about the sheer invisible cost of every weekday designated an official day-off, by way of the sheer loss of otherwise normal working hours, measured by the value of each hour in at least (or most) a normal eight-hour day, across all forms of employment.

This is inestimable wastage that will automatically result in incrementally-increasing the state’s loss of annual revenue earnings.

Carefree, careless and overjoyed Caribbean sports commentators also (thankfully unsuccessfully) tried very-hard to collar the Prime Ministers of Dominica and Saint Lucia into committing to publicly designating public holidays for their islands’ respective Olympic winners.

But the loud calls for a public holiday for every winning athlete or global sports achiever in respective Caribbean states, while sounding and meaning well, must be tempered by wise considerations and realistic reasoning about likely unintended and hard-to-reverse results.

Take the matter of Cuba’s champion wrestler Mijain López Núñez, who this year won his fifth consecutive Olympic Gold medal – a five-time World Champion and five-time Pan American Games champion, who won Gold each time in Beijing 2008, London 2012, Rio De Janiero 2016 and Tokyo 2020.

Had the Cuban government designated a national holiday for Mijain after his first win in Beijing 16 years ago, would he have had five public holidays at home today?

And if Jamaica had designated an Usain Bolt Day and a Shell-Ann Fraser-Pryce Day each time they and all other gold-medal winners won over the years, how much space would be left in the nation’s calendar just for sporting holidays?

Barbadians would call that ‘Tom Foolery’, or Just mekkin’ sport. (Playing silly games)

Caribbean Governments must therefore studiously avoid creating precedents inviting similar requests for other global achievers in world sports (like Saint Lucia’s former Mr World and Mr Universe Rick Wayne for bodybuilding and West Indies Captain and Pakistan coach Darren Sammy for Cricket) or for any other achievements that made their countries proud on the world stage.

And what about post-humous awards for those who may qualify retroactively?

This not-so-obvious overdose of Caribbean nationalism can easily lead to mistakes by governments moving too-fast and thinking too-slow.

Indeed, instead of rushing-the-brush, it might be much-better for related governments to ‘wheel-and-come-again’ (to borrow a popular Caribbean phrase that originated in Jamaica meaning ‘Do better than that…’) – like launching national consultations on how best to honour, award and reward those who created these immortal moments.

Without limiting such consultations to online participation, citizens can be afforded opportunities, wherever they are, over sufficient time, utilizing both traditional and modern means of communication, including billboards and public service announcements.

Such measures will also help develop popular Caribbean democracy at community levels, with media backing, public and private support, through innovative hybrid strategies for Caribbean citizen in this ‘Age of the Internet of Things’ and increasing reliance on everything from Information Technology (IT), Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Augmented Reality, to Biometrics and Humanoid Robots.

But simply declaring a public holiday because every other worker simply loves a day-off with-pay, or simply to ‘stay home’, is just not a good idea.