Ato Boldon: Still in the fast lane
JAMAICA OBSERVER
DANIA BOGLE, Observer staff reporter bogled@jamaicaobserver.com
Saturday, January 26, 2008
Boldon…I never wanted to be a coach but seeing my athletes I believe I made the right decision
PRIVATE pilot, television analyst, Saudi Arabia athletics team coach, politician - all this after winning four Olympic medals and four World Championship medals. Life after track & field has taken a few interesting turns for former Trinidadian sprinter, Ato Boldon.
Some Jamaicans might remember Boldon as a feisty 22-year-old when he won his first Olympic medal, clocking 9.90 seconds for bronze in the 100m in the same race in which Donovan Bailey clocked a world record 9.84 seconds for gold at the 1996 Atlanta Games.
Boldon, whose mother is Jamaican, went on to win a bronze medal in the 200m at the same Games. The following year he won his first world title in the 200m at the 1997 IAAF World Championships in Athens, Greece, and then two more Olympic medals - silver in the 100m and bronze in the 200m at the Sydney Olympics three years later.
Boldon’s career in television started at that time while he was still an active athlete in 1999, but couldn’t go to the World Championships in Seville, Spain, that year because of injury
“My manager insisted that I go and even though I wanted to stay in Los Angeles and feel sorry for myself… I ended up on the BBC for several hours and the next year they hired me to do sideline interviews at the US Olympic trials. That’s when the bug bit me,” he told Sporting World of his baptism into the world of broadcasting.
“Once I retired I knew I was going to go in that direction and as I got more comfortable I got a little better at it and started to attract more attention.”
Boldon was hired by US television network CBS to be part of their team at track & field meets.
“NBC saw me on CBS and that led to me last year (2007) doing the World Championships from Osaka, and this year I’ll be doing all the NBC meets and all the CBS meets,” he said.
That includes being on NBC’s team for the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing, China, and Boldon is excited about the prospect.
“That is the Holy Grail for a track broadcaster,” he said.
He said contrary to what outsiders might think, broadcasting is not the easiest job in the world.
“I’ve always fancied myself to be relatively comfortable in front of a camera, but it’s so much more than that. people I respect in the business make it seem effortless and I learned very quickly that it’s not what you know (because you can know a whole lot and say it at the wrong time or give irrelevant information).”
“I had to find the balance between me having almost an encyclopaedic knowledge of track & field in the sprints and tempering that with explaining it to someone so that they share your passion for track & field and understand it as well,” he said.
Boldon, who turned 34 on December 30, now divides his time between homes in Los Angeles and Florida in the United States, where he has lived since he was 14.
He returned to the land of his birth for a short period between 2006 and 2007 to become an opposition senator in T&T’s United National Congress (UNC) Party which was led by Basdeo Panday.
“I was frustrated with how sports is run in Trinidad & Tobago, in particular athletics, which is like the bastard step-child of the sporting world in Trinidad. there it is like football, cricket, horseracing, track & field is fifth or sixth, whereas in Jamaica track & field is king,” he said of his foray into politics.
However, his dreams of someday becoming a Member of Parliament or Minister of Sports were extinguished soon after joining the UNC.
“As soon as I joined the party a lot of people started having issues with (Basdeo) Panday’s leadership and started to leave. So most of the talent in the party whom I thought could lead it back into government started to leave, so that dream fell apart and after a year I said I have other things that I want to go do,” he said.
These days, when Boldon - who earned a private pilot’s licence not long after his retirement - isn’t flying himself around, he coaches Saudi Arabia’s athletics team.
“They come to me for half of the year in Los Angeles and I go there for the other half of the year,” he said, adding that coaching hadn’t been his first option.
“I never wanted to coach because I never thought I had the patience for it and I thought it was very stereotypical. But I had too many people tell me, ‘you have four Olympic medals, four World Championship medals, you have to give that back you can’t just turn your back on the sport’, and I started to believe and having been coaching for almost a year and seeing my athletes have success, I believe I made the right decision and I really do enjoy it,” he said.
[b]Boldon, in the meantime, said he is looking forward to a humdinger of a women’s 100m final in Beijing come August with Jamaicans Veronica Campbell-Brown, Sherone Simpson and American Torri Edwards expected to be there.
“Everybody is going to want to see the re-match of Tyson Gay vs Asafa Powell (men’s 100m), but I think the women’s 100m may be the most exciting race in a very long time,” he declared.[/b]