Olympic Sports Scholarships Yielding Record Results

Belize’s athletes aren’t merely competing, they’re winning, and the momentum is building fast. Behind the podium finishes and record‑breaking performances is a focused push by the Belize Olympic Committee to give top talent what they need most: time, support, and the freedom to train. Secretary General Giovanni Alamilla says a select group of athletes is receiving financial backing to train full‑time, and the payoff is already clear. In recent weeks, cyclists Jyven Gonzalez and Justin Chavarria dominated the Holy Saturday Cross Country Cycling Classic, Brooklyn Little powered her way to gold at CARIFTA, and swimmer Davia Richardson wrapped up her season with personal‑best times. Alamilla says this is exactly the result the program aimed for, and a glimpse of what Belizean athletes can achieve when investment meets opportunity.

 

Giovanni Alamilla, Secretary General, Belize Olympic &  Commonwealth Games Association

“Recently, of course with the cross country results, Jyven finishing fourth, I believe Derek finished fifth, and in CARIFTA you had Brooklyn coming in first. So those are things that we are keeping track of. And we’re very excited because now we’re seeing the results. We’re seeing that yes we’re coming in on the back end. It’s, we haven’t invested in it with them for twenty, thirty years or anything like that. But we are, we’re as the Olympic committee, we are bringing them over the peak, as you say, or bringing them to peak. And the idea is to have them peak when you have qualifiers for Pan-American games, Olympic games because we don’t want to have athletes just representing Belize and receiving invitational slot, right? We want to see athletes qualify.  With this investment and the scholarship is for four years. So you have these six athletes that are given a monthly salary to train, right? And to help with any other expenses they might have with school, with coach, with, in, in Davia’s case, with a pool, renting of a pool. She uses a sports psychologist. With Brooklyn, with masseuse and, so everything, it adds up. So we’re hoping that this kind of alleviates a lot of the pressure on them and their family. And they get fifteen hundred US a month.”

 

Attention readers: This online newscast is a direct transcript of our evening television broadcast. When speakers use Kriol, we have carefully rendered their words using a standard spelling system.

 

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