t?s ten in the morning at Orbis Investment Management on Bermudiana Road, and Jon Brunson has already been up for five hours and is buzzing.

The Shadow Sports Minister is in the throes of training for the Bank of Bermuda Triathlon in September and began yesterday with a one and a half hour bike ride, followed soon after by a five kilometre jog. After work, he was set for a game of squash. This is pretty much an average day for him. It?s exhausting just writing it.

One would have thought that as the shadow for both Sport and Works and Engineering, as well holding down a full-time job at Orbis and being the father of two young children, the man would have enough on his plate already.

Not a bit of it. As he explained, life would for him be a truly desolate existence without exercise and despite the huge amount of responsibility he has taken on in recent years, there was never any question in his mind that he would have to scale back his athletic commitments.

His sports career is certainly long and impressively varied.

From his early schooling at Heron Bay, through to High School in Panama where his family moved when he was a teenager, to college in Florida, Brunson has never been inactive.

And he believes this love of sport and understanding of what athletes need and what makes them tick gives him a fundamental advantage over the current Sports Minister, Dale Butler.

?Since I was young I have been extremely active and have been involved in all sorts of sports,? he said, after sipping from a glass of orange juice and water in the Orbis boardroom.

?When the US base was here, I played in the Little League at both American football and baseball. Later on I played football for Port Royal and in the Commercial League for what was then KPMG but has now become MR Onions. I played field hockey for the Upstarts as well and while at college I was in the tennis and soccer teams.

?I?m training for the triathlon at the moment and I still compete in all the track meets I can, as well as the road races. I play quite a lot of squash and I?ve also been doing some spinning classes and kickboxing at the Olympic Club.

?So at one time or another I?ve played or been involved with most sports and I get a huge amount of enjoyment out of taking part.

?I find it a real release from the pressures of the day. I love getting up early in the morning to train because by the time I?m in the office I hit the ground running and I?m full of energy and my mind is alert.

?The shadow youth and sport portfolio was handed to me more by chance than design but as time has gone on I think people have started to realise how passionate I am about it and how much I want to help improve sport in Bermuda because I am a sportsman at heart.?

Brunson may have taken a little while to grow into the role he was first handed in 2003 as a newcomer to the political scene, but in the last year or so has become increasingly vocal over what he sees as a lack of vision on the part of the current Government in terms of the future development of sport on the Island.

He also recently gave a voice to several discontented sports governing bodies who believe Government?s past assurance that the $11 million injection into cricket would be just the start of a more comprehensive investment in sport across the board has so far come to very little.

Contrast cricket?s new-found wealth, Brunson suggested, with the comparatively meagre grant of $200,000 given to the Bermuda Olympic Association every year, or champion boxer Teresa Perozzi?s ongoing struggles for funds and decent training facilities, and it soon becomes clear that the system is not ?fair or efficient?.

Where also, Brunson questioned, is the report commissioned by Government three years ago on the state of the Island?s run-down sports clubs and what should be done to improve their crumbling infrastructure?

And what exactly has the much-heralded Clubs Commission ? headed by Rolfe Commissiong ? actually achieved since its existence was first announced in 2003?

?Few disputed at the time that the money invested in cricket was a good thing,? Brunson said.

?But if you look at how that came about, it is clear that the cricketers qualified for the World Cup with virtually no financial backing from Government. What they achieved was through their own blood, sweat and tears and their own hard work.

?Then of course they return to Bermuda as heroes and everybody jumps on the bandwagon, including Government, who will undoubtedly have seen the potential for making significant political capital out of the situation.

?What I?m suggesting is that the emphasis is the wrong way around. We shouldn?t just be investing in our athletes and our sports teams they have achieved something special. We should be giving them the opportunity and the resources beforehand.

?The bottom line on this whole issue is that the Government has failed to deliver. Nobody really knows what plans they have for sport. There certainly is a lot of talk and the Minister has given oodles and oodles of statements on what is being done, but weeks and months go by and nothing really ever seems to come of it.

?It?s been clear for some time that there is an urgent need to identify how we go about helping our sports clubs, because many of them are not in the shape they ought to be. And the formation of a Clubs Commission to provide a report on the entire issue was a laudable idea.

?But here we are, a full three years later, and there is no report in sight and there is no indication that the Commission has achieved anything.

?There was also a report commissioned a year ago on female sport in Bermuda, but yet again we have seen no end product.

?There seems to be a similar problem at the National Sports Centre and the ongoing problems with the pitch there.

?There has been all this money invested and we are trying to take cricket to another level, yet at the same time we?ve got nowhere to host international games. There doesn?t seem to be a will to deal with the problem and it will drift off into the background for a while, and when it comes up again they will scramble around for an explanation.

?But the public wants to see something happen and it is time they got the problem sorted out.?

runson is also adamant that the link between sport and education is too often under-valued in Bermuda.

While plenty of Government politicians will talk animatedly about the positive role sport can play in society, he said, come Budget time the money allocated to it rarely reflects their initial enthusiasm.

?I?ve spoken about it before, but I really do think there is a need for a national sports agenda, which would be a definitive plan for how we intend to take sport forward,? he said.

?One of the most important things we always say is that education is key to the future prosperity of our community. If education is key, we have also got to recognise the opportunities that sport provides for an individual to get a decent education.

?Most of our young people who go abroad to study look to the US and Canada and there are so many scholarships on offer for those with sporting talent.

?The sports that are big there are things like tennis, golf, soccer, track, basketball, swimming and sailing and I think we have to look at whether we are investing enough in these sports and whether the athletes involved are being given the support they need to be good enough to be awarded these scholarships.

?Soccer is meant to be one of our national sports, but in comparison to cricket they get hardly any money to make whatever goals they have a reality. And it seems ridiculous to me that the Bermuda Olympic Association is only given $200,000 every year, from which they have to try and fund all of their elite athletes.

?It?s just not enough ? and when we win the next election, we will be looking to change things significantly.?