By Earl Bousquet

A national bank is proud she’s its Global Ambassador and a regional bank is waving her flag as a potential regional money-earner, while the island’s tourism authorities are brimming with confidence about her further potential as a national attraction.
Alfred returned home yesterday with two Gold-and-Silver Medals (each) from the world’s two top athletics events -the Olympic Games and the Diamond League- won two months apart (between August and September 2024).
She’d also earlier won the 60-meter World Indoor Championship, arriving with an added-up total of five winning medals -three Golds and two Silvers.
Alfred’s was the biggest homecoming welcome by the youngest major global sports achiever since Independence -and the Caribbean’s most-notable 2024 Track & Field sensation, bar-none.
She stands alongside the other Olympic award-winning athletes from the Caribbean’s smaller island states (like Dominica and Grenada) who also carved their nations’ name in Olympic History in Paris -and in Gold.
Indeed, like Cuba’s legendary five-time Olympic wrestling winner Mijain Lopez who retired in Paris after five Olympic Gold wins (in as-many games over 16 years), Alfred also made the wider Caribbean proud.
Beleaguered by suggestions and recommendations as to how-best to celebrate the 2024 Olympic and Diamond League Caribbean champion at home, the Government of Saint Lucia planned a four-day observance, starting with her arrival on September 22 and ending with a Julien Alfred National Holiday on September 27.
The Friday holiday will start an extra-long celebratory weekend, but will be preceded by several national events featuring the Olympic winner: school visits (including to her community school in Ciceron), unveiling a monument in her honor -and a national concert at the equivalent of the island’s national sports stadium.
The government will unveil its entire Julien Alfred reward package during the four days, but one repeated popular call has been for a renaming of the Ciceron community she grew-up in from ‘Monkey Town’.
Another suggestion was “renaming the George Odlum Stadium after Julien Alfred…”
(A reference to an original Olympic-standard stadium built in Vieux Fort in 2002 that was transformed a decade later into an emergency hospital after the colonial-era St. Jude hospital burnt on October 9, 2012.)
Such has been her victory’s effect on fellow citizens that every Saint Lucian wants or claims a piece of Alfred.
Actually, she’s become a commodity: Made-in-Saint Lucia, exported to the world -and yielding the highest-rates-of-return in Olympic and Diamond League Gold and Silver rewards.
Many fellow citizens at home and abroad -and Caribbean citizens too- (most likely) either don’t know or simply don’t care that Alfred’s global image was shaped representing the University of Texas, making and breaking national (US) Track & Field records on the state collegiate tracks like never seen before.
Saint Lucians at home started laying claim (very-early) to Alfred’s fame: from restaurants offering ‘Julien Alfred Chicken-and-Rice’ and ‘100-meter Lentils’ or ‘200-meter Pigeon Peas’ in August, to advertisers proudly flaunting her image, medals and other Olympic memorabilia -with gay abandon- in September.
It’s like Julien Alfred is (now) everybody’s own -so-much-so, that the Saint Lucia Olympic Committee (SLOC) was moved to issue a public statement on September 21, calling on advertisers to respect Olympic copyright considerations.
The SLOC urged companies to stop displaying the Olympic rings and other such patented symbols on their roadside advertising billboards -or anywhere else…
Of course, the SLOC will have challenges enforcing its call, especially during the four-day ‘JuJu-mania’ that will prevail nationally.
But the statement certainly helped bring a cold realization -especially to those who either don’t know or don’t care about copyright regulations, protected intellectual rights and other such legal considerations.
Musicians -from calypsonians to reggae artistes at home and abroad, Saint Lucian, Caribbean and International- composed and dedicated heralding songs about the fastest woman in the world.
And it also sounds like everyone in Saint Lucia this week wants to be counted at the Darren Sammy Ground (formerly the Beausejour Cricket Ground), the first Caribbean stadium built for Cricket World Cup in 2007, eventually named after the island’s foremost international cricketer.
Under Sammy’s captaincy, the West Indies won the 2012 and 2016 International Cricket Council (ICC) WorldTwenty20; he’s the only captain to win the T20 World Cup twice; and was a member of the West Indies team that won the 2004 ICC Champions Trophy.
To celebrate Julien Alfred at the Darren Sammy Ground is, therefore, a national occasion that’s sure to fill the island’s biggest sporting facility on a holiday in her name.
A global ambassador for the island’s only indigenous bank, 1st National Bank (Saint Lucia) Ltd, Alfred has impressed the Caribbean like never before. The Eastern Caribbean Central Bank (ECCB) is recommending that Saint Lucia and other member-states take immediate steps to tap into her victory’s wealthy potential for regional Sports Tourism.
The island’s tourism authorities welcome that she’s already attracting visitors -like the mother of another world-famous Paris Olympics winner. American Keisha Caine Bishop -mother of Noah Lyles, the World and Olympic Men’s 100-meter Champion, visited the island in mid-September, following-up on a promise to Alfred.
Bishop first met Alfred as the World Indoor women’s 60m champion and Olympic 100m gold medalist, at the 2023 US NCAA Championships. Herself a former established track-and-field athlete, Bishop posted a viral video -shot on a Saint Lucia beach- inviting the world to “add Saint Lucia to your travel bucket list…”
It’s not often (these days) that the Caribbean gets an opportunity to rally around its heroes who’ve made everyone proud by their achievements -and in Alfred’s case, her admirable near-immaculate humility.
It’s therefore understandable too, that overdoses of ‘JuJu-mania’ can and will grip many Saint Lucians this week. After all, the region’s fastest woman says she wants to be ‘The next Usain Bolt!’.