“I discovered girls like boys who run fast,” answered Kim Anderson Collins when inquiries were made into how he had started and has continued to have such passion for the genre of track and field. The qualities of comportment exhibited by Mr. Collins, though, contradict the idea that he would have had to have taken such strenuous a route to win the favour of the fairer sex.

Kim Anderson Collins sat in the Pavilion, which bears his name, on Monday September 14^th and fought with himself and wrenched at the heart strings of others who heard him say the word ‘retirement’. The weight that he carted around on his shoulders would have killed a lesser man. Yet, here he was in the throes of remorse that he could no longer push his 33year old body to keep up with the apparition of Usain ‘lightening’ Bolt, a man one decade younger than he, and still not at his peak with such performances world record setting time of 9.58sec.  “It has been an incredible journey for me in track and field,” Mr. Collins said with his customary self- effacing ease. “Starting out almost 17 years ago it was a journey that almost had no destination,” he continued as he revealed the core of an utmost honesty.

Mr. Collins could not at the start, where youth dictated the future, have known the full extent of destination. The winds from his fleet-footed races were enough to flutter the skirts, but unbeknownst to Mr. Collins, his boyish desires were merely the smatterings of a master plan that would utilize track and field to affect a much beloved athlete to epitomize the resolve of a nation, the strength of his own character, an obedience to respect for himself and others and consequently cementing his own yield to maturity into the annuls of history.

Making his debut in 1997 at the Word Championship when St. Kitts-Nevis were thought by the world to be a parish located in St. Thomas United States Virgin Island, not even Livingston Bramble, the boxer who fought some of the biggest names in boxing, could make St. Kitts-Nevis appear any bigger than a mustard seats on the mind of the world.

By 2000 Mr. Collins had already qualified for the Olympics, a feat unaccomplished by any athlete from St. Kitts-Nevis, no matter their success. Ranked at #4 in the world at a time when Tyson Gay and Usain Bolts were ranked tied at #12 was all part of the impossibility of a man called Kim Anderson Collins.

Becoming the world fastest man in 2003 in Paris was undoubtedly the pinnacle of euphoria felt at any time in the tiny Federation of St. Kitts and Nevis.  Reaping Bronze at the World Championship in 2001 Gold and Silver in the Commonwealth Games of 2002, Bronze again in the World Championships in 2005 and silver in 2006 added to an abundance of International Association of Athletics Federation (IAAF) honours. None of this had been able to shake Mr. Collins from his humble drug-free style of living in an arena that preen athletes to bloated egos the sizes of monstrosities. The name St. Kitts-Nevis, because of him, became a household name and the quiet man, Mr. Collins, became someone on whom the Kittitian and Nevisian citizenry could depend to represent and carry his country’s flag with distinction and honour. No questions put to Mr. Collins about the grudging reciprocity meted out by the St. Kitts-Nevis Government compared to the magnanimity of his efforts for his country could bait him into answering with petty rancor. What he has done, he has done for his country, and that is all he knows.

Alas, there was one thing that could shake Mr. Collins. In the investment sector, the yield to maturity comes when the investors buys bonds early at market price, assuming that those bonds will be held until they mature, the principle payments would then be made on schedule. No one should dispute that Kim Anderson Collin’s payments has been made on schedule. At a time when young men are floundering to find their way through the squalor of peers sprawled dead on the streets, along comes one man who is shaken and broken down into heart-rending tears, no more than for the nationalistic reason that on the grand stage of track and field he could do no more for his country.

 Mr. Collins had long journeyed from attempting to attract girls and have elevated to the full-blown edification of numerous others in the ways of humility, consistency and a love of country undiminished. Mr. Kim Anderson Collins thank you for the lesson.