A petition has been launched to name the National Stadium, when rebuilt, after Louis Albert Lynch, the late former principal of Modern High School.
The driving force behind it is the Modern High School Old Scholars’ Association, and the move has garnered support from former Director of Sports Erskine King and Steve Stoute, immediate past president of the Barbados Olympic Association (BOA).
The appeal is being made under the Barbados National Honours And Decorations (Amendment) Act, 2025.
An advisory council has been set up and can make recommendations to the Prime Minister to “name or rename a public building, a public road or a public space after a person as a national honour”.
Achievements
“We, the members of the Modern High School Old Scholars’ Association, assert that the qualities and achievements of our beloved principal and mentor exceed any that can reasonably be expected from a candidate for this honour,” the petition stated.
Lynch founded the Modern High School in 1944 to expand the opportunities for secondary and tertiary education in Barbados. He not only established scholarships to the school, but negotiated the first athletics and academic scholarship for graduates to pursue studies in the United States, with Patsy Callender and Lorna Forde among his success stories.
The VIP Stand at the old National Stadium was named after Lynch, who served as president of the Amateur Athletics Association of Barbados from 1955 to 1962 and was the first BOA president from 1962 until his death seven years later. He was also president of the Barbados Table Tennis Association and the Basketball Association.
Lynch was a sportsman in his own right, having played football, cricket, basketball and table tennis.
He was also a boxer. According to the Old Scholars, he held the 440 yards record for 20 years. “We, the past students of the Modern High School, together with our friends and supporters, are dismayed that, with the demolition of the building that housed the Louis Lynch Secondary School, coupled with the destruction of the Louis Lynch Stand at the old National Stadium, very little will remain to honour the legacy of this outstanding Barbadian. We therefore earnestly request that the new facility now under construction be named the Louis Albert Lynch National Stadium and affix our signatures below in support of our petition.” Stoute said Lynch was a pioneer and he would be happy to speak to the Prime Minister or Minister of Sport about the renaming.
“I would be fully supportive of that. He is the father of Olympism in Barbados.”
He explained that it was Lynch who reached out to the International Olympic Committee (IOC) in 1953 seeking membership for Barbados and later became the first president. In 1955, when the IOC accepted the island, the chairman was Fred Goddard, the vice-chairman was Justice Henry and Lynch was secretary general.
Barbados became part of the British West Indies Olympic Association on the formation of the West Indies Federation in 1958 and competed in the 1960 Olympic Games in Rome, in which James “Jim” Wedderburn won a bronze medal with the 4×400 metres relay team. When the federation broke up in 1962, Lynch worked towards forming the first BOA, Stoute recalled.
Asked how he would present an argument to younger people about Lynch in an era where Olympic bronze medallist Obadele Thompson would no doubt be mentioned in the same conversation, Stoute stated: “Well, if Lynch hadn’t started the Olympic movement, Barbados would never have participated at the Olympic Games.
“I’m sure somebody else would have done it later on, but as it stands right now, he was the individual that reached out to the International Olympic Committee in order to get Barbados its membership, and led the first team, which I was a member of, to the Olympic Games in 1968 in Mexico City.”
Meanwhile, King said there was uncertainty about whether the names from the old National Stadium would be reused.
‘Deserving’
“So they might be a little previous in doing that . . . . They can easily come back and say, ‘Well, we haven’t made a determination about the existing names’,” he said.
“Of course he [Lynch] deserves it, and all of those persons whose names adorn those stands are deserving of having the stands go back to them again . . . . There’s no harm in sending a petition to the committee, but that’s two years down the line before that’s completed.”
King said Thompson’s name and possibly that of Commonwealth gold medallist Andrea Blackett might also be up for consideration, but Lynch “would have done quite well in terms of the administrative aspect of it”.
When contacted, Minister of Sports Charles Griffith said members of the public could petition to have public buildings and other places renamed and signatures could strengthen an application.
“It is not a one-man thing, like a Minister of Sports being able to make that decision. There’s a committee in place that will look at it based on merit, based on the signatures that you were able to gather and then a decision will be made,” he said.
The petition is online at https://docs.google. com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSeqLqkVDbMcYsg5j4_ OQsE5lWkYK_v6Dw0TmUHahTAaLc4qfg/ viewform.
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