Solidarity $$$ helps Pacific Olympians

Pagopago: The countdown is on to see which Pacific athletes will receive special financial assistance called solidarity funding, to help them on their way to competing in the 2024 Paris Summer Olympics.

For some elite athletes, the Olympic Solidarity programme can make the difference between securing a place at the Games or not.

National Olympic Committees around the Pacific will find out in January which of their athletes have qualified for a share from the latest round of solidarity funding.

The International Olympic Committee makes grants available to all countries, but for the island nations the money is vital, and often the difference between an athlete making it to the Games or not.

For swimmer Tilali Scanlon a personal best performance in the 100m breaststroke at the Olympics in Tokyo was the experience of her sporting life.

But she almost didn’t make it.

She was marooned in Fiji for months, where she was able to complete her studies at the University of the South Pacific, but she couldn’t swim because for most of the time all pools were closed as a result of the pandemic.

However Tilali had money in the bank from the Olympic Solidarity fund and once she completed her degree, she put that money to very good use.

“...Since we hadn’t used it for any competitions in 2020, we saved it up and we used it to send me to Thailand where I did training from February all the way up until the Olympics, and it worked out quite well,” she said.

“Because right after I left, Fiji’s (COVID-19) cases spiked and they actually closed down the pools again,” she told Pacific Beat.

The solidarity fund contains a variety of pots of money that National Olympic Committees can dip into and each committee can put athletes forward for scholarships.

But the application process can be difficult, which prompted the SecretaryGeneral of American Samoa’s NOC, Ethan Lake, to hold a workshop to guide athletes and administrators through the process.

“It’s really to help out the smaller NOCs that don’t have much. For us for example, American Samoa, we’re pretty much 100 per cent dependent on IOC grant funds, because unlike the US we don’t have any major sponsors,” he said.

The solidarity funding programme also includes US$125,000 (FJ$250,000) per country that can be spent on national sports programmes, but Lake said that even in American Samoa, the money doesn’t go far.

“For countries like American Samoa, Tuvalu, Vanuatu, these are very large amounts of money that we definitely could use, but we have 27 sports, so if you divide that with 27 sports,