Facing budget woes, Haiti Olympic Committee struggles to get Team Haiti to Paris games

The list of athletes hoping to represent Haiti at this year’s Summer Olympic Games in Paris isn’t long. It includes a gymnast who is a women’s gymnastics assistant coach, a 14-year-old swimmer from Boca Raton and a 100-meter hurdler who is a St. Thomas Aquinas High graduate with Miami roots.

But the road to the two-week global competition in Paris hasn’t been easy for Team Haiti and its supporters. With barely two weeks to go before the athletes are supposed to parade down the Seine River through the heart of the city in the July 26 Opening Ceremony, the head of the Haitian Olympic Committee says he is still trying to raise money to send the athletes to the games.

“We’ve contacted the diaspora, the private sector to see what we could find to cover the costs,” said Dr. Hans Larsen, the head of the committee, which will celebrate its 100th year anniversary this year.

Larsen said when the committee contemplated sending a 11-member delegation to Paris to compete, the costs came to $405,000. The amount included reimbursements for training, qualification costs, air fare and other expenses needed to compete in the international arena alongside the world’s best athletes.

So far they’ve only managed to raise about $155,000, which includes support from sponsors and $120,000 from the Olympics Solidarity program. An initiative of the International Olympic Committee, the solidarity program assists athletes with training and other preparations needed to get to the games.

One entity that has yet to provide any support toward the committee’s $250,000 shortfall, Larsen said, is the government of Haiti.

“The Haitian government didn’t give us any money,” he said.

The Miami Herald reached out to the government for comment but did not hear back. In a Thursday column in the country’s oldest daily, Le Nouvellist editor-in-chief Frantz Duval noted that sports is a sector “that doesn’t require a lot, but can give a lot.”

“Neither the government nor the private sector invests in sports. There is no investment in talent scouting or career support. Luck and love of the game are the driving forces for Haiti in every sport,” Duval, who is also the general manager of Magik 9 radio station, wrote.

“If Haiti still has sporting ambitions, if there are still authorities who believe that young people need sports activities to offer them other alternatives, if the country believes it is important to compete with the best in the world, the government and the private sector must open their checkbooks.”

Larsen, a physician who spearheaded an effort to get an Olympics sports complex built in Haiti after the country’s devastating 2010 earthquake, said the team will get to Paris. But to make it happen, the committee has had to borrow money from other programs and areas such as administrative costs to cover the delegation’s expenses.

“We had to stop everything to make Paris possible,” he said.

This year’s games, which run July 26-Aug. 11, will host about 10,500 athletes from 184 countries competing in 329 events. Among them will be the small delegation from Haiti, seven athletes in five sporting events: track and field, boxing, women’s gymnastics, judo and swimming. None of the athletes for Team Haiti, who will be wearing designs by Haitian-Italian designer Stella Jean and Haitian painter Philippe Dodard, currently live in the Caribbean country.

“With the situation, who can be sure that they will be able to train everyday? No one,” Larsen said, explaining the challenges of fielding athletes from inside the volatile Caribbean nation, where deadly violence by criminal groups led to the deployment of a Kenya-led multinational security force, the country’s third international intervention in the last 30 years. “You cannot organize real competitions.”

So the committee drew competitors from its expansive diaspora, tapping the sons and daughters of Haitians as well as athletes who emigrated to the United States and Canada as babies or youngsters. They include a boxer, 25-year-old Cédrick Belony-Duliepre, who lives in Montreal and won bronze last November at the Pan American Games in Santiago, Chile; 25-year-old Penn State gymnastics assistant coach Lynnzee Brown; 14-year-old swimmer and Boca Raton resident Mayah Chouloute. Also joining the group is Emelia Chatfield, a recent University of Texas at Austin graduate who was born in Miami and attended St. Thomas Aquinas High School in Hollywood.

Like Brown and Mayah, Chatfield was born to Haitian parents in the United States. She was chosen by the Haitian Amateur Athletic Federation after achieving the Olympic standard in the NCAA West First Round earlier this year and will compete for Haiti in the 100-meter hurdles.

Despite the ongoing economic, humanitarian and security crises facing Haiti, Larsen said canceling the chance to showcase the country’s pride isn’t an option.

“Sports field hope,” he said. “It’s a light that shows that it’s not only violence that could form someone. I think it’s a medium that governments, Haiti’s in particular, don’t sufficiently use to unite youth, so that Haitians can sit together and speak to one another and live together normally.”

Before he became an orthopedic surgeon in a country where specialists are rare, Larsen was an athlete who also had Olympic dreams. His dream of representing Haiti at the 1976 Montreal Olympics in the long jump, however, got sidelined by a ruptured tendon in his right ankle.

“Going to the Olympics is a dream of every athlete,” he said. “They spend their lives training for the moment. If you cancel it, you cancel the dreams of a youth and it would be difficult to make them believe in it again.”

Larsen recalls his own days as an athlete in Port-au-Prince. The camaraderie and competition, he said, took him throughout the country where he formed bonds with people “in all social classes and neighborhoods in Haiti, up to now.

“I believe sports is an extraordinary medium that we don’t value enough.”

Donations to the team can be made to Corresponding Bank: Bank of New York, Fed Wire ABA 21000018, Swift No. IRVTUS3N, Account name: Banque de l’Union Haitienne, S.A., Account No. 890-0510-005, Swift No. BUHEHTPP; For credit to: Comité Olympique Haïtien Account No. 1400 - 0016595