Olympian Chelsea Edghill will see her request to the National Sports Commission for support in June being honoured today after Director of Sport, Steve Ninvalle, announced yesterday that the table tennis player would receive $1M to aid in her preparation for upcoming tournaments.
Accompanied by president of the Guyana Table Tennis Association (GTTA), Godfrey Munroe, Edghill had on June 8 met with Ninvalle to highlight her situation and to make a formal request for assistance from the National Sports Commission (NSC).
At the time, Edghill had just received news that she would be heading to the 32nd Olympiad in Japan (Tokyo 2020).
“Chelsea Edghill would’ve presented to us, through the GTTA, a very complete proposal. With that, the proposal would’ve included her training. As a Commission, we felt it was important to…support her throughout the years, but this ($1M) is just an initial support,” Ninvalle has said.
Ninvalle explained thus, “What we would do is that we’ll look back after four months, we would see how that training is going and see whether or not we will invest more (money) into Ms Edghill.”
GTTA president Godfrey Munroe receiving the cheque on Chelsea Edghill’s behalf from Chairman of the NSC, Kashif Muhammad (first from left) and Director of Sport Steve Ninvalle (first from right)
According to the Director of Sport, “it’s not a done deal that this is just the $1M we will be given to Ms Edghill and we’ll stop there. What we will be doing is looking at her performance during the course of the training.”
Meanwhile, Munroe has said the GTTA is happy that the request has been honoured. He pointed out that “it’s welcoming and it’s commendable that the Ministry and the National Sports Commission is backing its statement with action.
“We (the GTTA) are happy about this, because it shows that we have a partner that we can call on. I know the Director of Sport, being the head of an Association…, because he understands the challenges,” Munroe noted.
Further, he reasoned, “It’s great to see the manifestation and action from our initial meeting, that we’re here receiving the support for Chelsea. They did say that this is just an appetizer, but they will be looking to see how she goes about her training and so on. In our ‘fan out’ meeting, a lot of things were discussed.”
Chelsea Edghill
Edghill, a former Caribbean U21 champion, was one of 86 women in Tokyo vying for Olympic glory, and how she got there wasn’t by luck or by winning the table tennis lottery, as some would say, but really through her brilliance over the years.
The IOC’s Tripartite Commission had two slots (one male and one female) to select from among National Olympic Committees that didn’t have more than eight athletes at the two previous Olympic Games in London (2012) and Rio (2016).
The Tripartite Commission selected Togo’s Dodji Fanni and Guyana’s Chelsea Edghill.
The 24-year-old Edghill had a historic showing in Tokyo, where, playing in the very first match of the Women’s Singles Tournament, she brushed aside Fiji’s Sally Yee 4-1 (11-5, 4-11, 11-3, 11-6, 11-8).
On the surface, Edghill’s match-winning performance might seem casual, given her brilliance in the sport, but in the table tennis world, it represented ‘history’; not just for Guyana, but for the Caribbean as well.
While Edghill became Guyana’s first table tennis player, male or female, to represent the country in the sport at the Olympics, the Linwood University graduate (Chemistry) has also been the first female player from the English-speaking Caribbean to feature at the event since it became an Olympic sport in 1988.
After her much-talked-about and celebrated victory over Yee, Edghill’s next opponent was 17-year-old Shin Yubin from South Korea.
Shin Yubin is South Korea’s youngest-ever representative in the sport, and against Edghill, the world 85th ranked player showed why she’s one of the best players in the world, winning 4-0 (11-7, 11-9, 11-1, 12-10).
After wrapping up her time at the Olympics, Edghill took what she’s calling “a much-needed break” from the sport to enjoy her vacation in New York.
She’s set to return home to Guyana this weekend.
