When folks repeat the adage, “the sky is the limit”, few take it literally but Cyril Cameron Burke has achieved this in the literal and metaphorical way: as a meteorologist focusing on rainfall and weather patterns, and as a sportsman whose affinity for sports has taken him to the highest administrative levels.

Now working as Chef de Mission at his fourth Olympic Games, he described himself as “an old boy” at international assignments.

“My development in this area started way back in 2000. I joined the Barbados Olympic Association (BOA) in 1996 as a director and my first outing was at the 2000 Olympics in Sydney. I was the assistant Chef de Mission for those Games. Following that I moved to the 2002 Central American and Caribbean Games as Chef de Mission and I have not looked back since,” he said with nary a hint of breathlessness or pride.

Burke, fondly known as “Cammie”, also worked at the Olympic Games in 2008 and 2012 along with the Commonwealth Games in 2006, 2010 and 2014. He is also slated to be the Chef de Mission at next year’s Commonwealth Games in Birmingham.

Even after having travelled widely, he sees such assignments as the essence of honour in representing his country and is always overwhelmed by the unifying nature of sports.

“In the village in Tokyo right now we have 202 national Olympic committees from around the world, and Afghanistan and Pakistan are among those at war … but everybody is just walking about the village, hugging one another, shaking each other’s hands, standing up and talking; no war! Sport is the key. I have learnt over the years, even from my first outing in 2000, that the Olympics is not the competition. The Olympics is coming into the Games Village, seeing how people live and interacting with the athletes.

“The athlete is the reason why there is a national Olympic committee,” he added. “For an athlete to just qualify for the Olympics is an achievement. They have achieved because they are now among the crème-de-la-crème in their disciplines. It’s similar to being in a workplace and wanting to reach the top position. The athlete starts at the basic point saying ‘I want to go to the Olympics because this is the ultimate, this is the top of my job, the top of my profession.’ So in reaching the Olympics they have achieved, and we have to see this as a success story,” was how he put it.

Burke said he always encourages teams to aim for semifinals, which is the top 16, then try to surpass that point to reach the top eight, while a medal is the icing on the cake.

“Do not tell the athlete if you do not medal, you are a failure. You are not!,” he added, pointing to high potential in Jonathan Jones,  Sada Williams, Adana Belle, record-breaking sprinter Tristan Evelyn, Shane Brathwaite who is still a force to be reckoned with in perhaps his last Olympics, along with swimmers Danielle Titus and Alex Sobers.

“For example, this is Danielle’s first outing but we are preparing her for 2024. She has been working at university with Leah Stancil (née Martindale). We have to look to the future, and most of those here will be looking to 2024 along with some at home who unfortunately did not make it, like Chelsea Tuach and Matthew Wright. Coming out of this showing, some of these athletes will also get scholarships for the next Olympics.

“We in the BOA will continue to work with them. Success for these athletes is financial support. I head the allocations committee … and certainly that is my focus; to make as much funds available as possible for the athletes, not only in the major sports but in wrestling, tennis, et cetera. We do not have enough but certainly we will try to support them when necessary,” Burke stated.

His passion for helping athletes is not surprising, having benefited himself from outstanding hockey coaching under the legendary Colonel Deighton Maynard.

“As a Combermerian … you had to do something along with your academic studies and this therefore led to involvement in some area of discipline. We understood that a healthy body helps you academically, so that was one of the tenets of being at school. Having played cricket and football, I had never played hockey so I started playing hockey soon after entering Waterford at ten years old. That would have been the beginning of things,” Burke recalled.

“All of us owe our development in sport and the discipline that it brings to Colonel Maynard, who was instrumental in showing us what was right from wrong. Of course, there were other teachers who guided us but it was in hockey where I developed the administrative skills, captained the school team, became a hockey umpire, left school and helped to form the YMCA hockey team, and captained the YMCA for eight consecutive years,” he added.

Burke’s sports administrative stint continued as secretary of the Barbados Hockey Federation for 14 straight years, being a national hockey umpire from 1982 and attending multi-sport games throughout the 80s and early 90s.

“So when I joined the BOA in 1996 I did so as a seasoned administrator, and obviously this was an extension of giving back to sport and also making sure I helped the BOA to do what was necessary for the promotion and development of sport in Barbados,” he stated.

What has always boggled the minds of colleagues and non-colleagues alike was Burke’s ability to balance his active sports life with his 41-year career in the science of meteorology. Now retired since 2016, he recalled:

“I must say that working at the Met Office (Barbados Meteorological Services) afforded me time because of the shift system, but I also have to pay tribute to the members of staff who were very cooperative and supportive in allowing me the time to be away from work to be involved in sports administration at a very high level.

“The Public Service offers you time off from work once you are representing your country but then there were other times when, during my umpiring days, there were assignments from the hockey federation, the Pan American Games organisation and so on; so you had to juggle your vacation, exchange shifts and utilise lieu days. You had to manage your time properly!

“The good thing about it was that I knew my schedule from the beginning of each year so I was able to plan and arrange how I wanted to take vacation and so on. One thing I tried to do was this: because I travelled so much while at work, I never insisted or demanded certain periods for vacation. I gave the other members of staff the opportunity to arrange their holidays around me, and I was always willing to do the extra shift because there would have been times when I would have called on them to do the same for me. We had an excellent working relationship. Recently, I told a friend of mine that I enjoyed every day of my working life at the Met Office! There was never a dull moment,” he said, beaming.

While hockey was his first love, Cammie’s penchant for mathematics, physics and geography prepared him, unwittingly, for the branch of science related to atmospheric processes and phenomena in order to forecast the weather.

“Getting into meteorology was a coincidence. You know it is always said that Combermerians look out for each other, so I lived on Culloden Road close to the Bay Pasture in the Bay Land and there was this chap, Randy Roberts, who died recently. He came to the Bay Pasture one afternoon and he said, ‘Cammie Burke, are you working yet?’ I replied, ‘No, I’m looking for a job right now.’ He told me, ‘All right, I will get back to you.’ The next evening he told me to come up to the Met Office for an interview, and that was where it started back in 1975.

“And I worked there from 1975 until 2016. It was 41 years of bliss!” he said with a laugh.

“Once a weatherman, always a weatherman and you would always be interested in what is going on. Even here recently with Hurricane Elsa, when it passed through I remarked to Ms. Sonia Nurse, who joined the Met Office a few months after me and became Director just after I retired, that it was times like these when there was this sort of weather activity that I missed work.”

However, Cammie Burke is enjoying retirement, staying fit and conducting business at his leisure.

“I think a lot of us do not plan for retirement but, fortunately or unfortunately, retirement just meant me devoting a little more time to Olympic work, so I remain active. Many people see me and ask, ‘Cammie Burke, you don’t intend to put on any weight? Yuh mean yuh gine keep lookin’ young all de time?’ My thing is not to worry about things which you have no answers for. You concern yourself about things for which an answer can be found. Accept things that you cannot change,” he explained.