By Neto Baptiste
Former Miss Teenage 1979 and former national athlete Lorraine Anthony is urging young women in Antigua and Barbuda to stop underestimating themselves.
Speaking on the Good Morning Jojo Sports Show Anthony, who also represented the US women’s soccer team at the 1983 Olympics, believes too many young women with the potential to excel are bamboozled into thinking they are just not good enough.
This she said, reminds her of her days as a wrestler.
“We had a coach that was very sexist and he said a woman can’t do what a man can do and I said ‘okay, give me your biggest guy and let’s go’, and I lifted him up and swung him into the ground and he was like, ‘okay’, and that was the end of that. I think that sometimes we limit ourselves because in our heads, we limit ourselves,” she said.
“My grandfather, Glen Francis, he never told me I couldn’t do anything. He always said ‘you can do anything you want if you study’, and I would ask why is he saying if I study because I am always studying. Bbut if you study your opponents or the person you’re up against, you can learn their weaknesses really quick and you can use it to your advantage,” she added.
Anthony, who migrated to the US in 1979 to be with her parents, said she was blessed to have been in the right places at the right times, but reminded that not everything comes easy.
“We all go through our own patches and if everybody sat down and wrote down all the things they have done or things they have experienced, then we would realise that we have had a very full life and that it’s not the this and that, but it’s a lot of in between and I was just lucky to be in the right place at the right time in some situations, and in other situations I wasn’t so lucky.
“You still have those experiences and you still have to live the life that was given to you because God is not going to give you more than you can handle and those experiences teach you,” she said.
Anthony also won the Presidential Award for Athletics in 1983, was a member of the 1983 US women’s football team to the Olympics and served 12 years in the US military.
A Catholic nun, Anthony, who hails from Drake Street in Ovals, competed in the high and long jump, 100 meters hurdles and sprints, the shot put, cross country, wrestling and powerlifting, among many other sports.