THE SKY IS DEFINITELY NOT FALLING

For the past decade and a half Jamaica has been blessed with an abundance of athletic talent. Don’t get me wrong, Jamaica has always had athletic talent. From GC Foster to Arthur Wint, Lennox Miller, Donald Quarrie, Raymond Stewart, Merlene Ottey, Juliet Cuthbert, Brigette Foster-Hylton and Veronica Campbell- Brown, Jamaica has had a seemingly constant stream of world-beating talent. However, since about the year 2000, the island has experienced an explosion of that talent. No longer were we going into major championships hoping for one or two medals, we were looking at winning medals in bunches including gold medals.

At the Commonwealth Games in 2006 Jamaica had a test run of all that talent that had now converged and gave the world a taste of what was to come. Jamaica dominated on the track like it never had before – 10 gold, four silver and eight bronze medals. We won every sprint except the 400 metres, we won the women’s triple jump, topped the sprint hurdles male and female, we medalled in the javelin, shot put and the mile relay for men. Two years later we turned it up a notch at the Olympics in Beijing with gold medals at the very highest level in the men’s and women’s sprints, something we have never done before. We also won the 400 metre hurdles and smashed the world record in the men’s sprint relay. We were officially a world power in track and field.

Since that time we have been consistent winning multiple medals at major championships like we never have before. Since 2004 we won more gold medals and medals in general than in all the years we participated in the years before. This is now officially the new golden age or the age of Bolt. The super-talented Jamaican has won six Olympic gold medals since 2008 and eight gold medals at the World Championships.

But how long could it last? As the saying goes, all things must come to an end. At the recently concluded IAAF World Junior Championships held in Eugene, Oregon, Jamaica were shut out of the sprints. Those were dominated by the USA, the country from which we took the sprint crown after they had dominated for decades. Jamaica was also beaten by Japan in both the boys’ sprint relays and mile relays relegating us to bronze in both races.

However, all was not lost. Among the six medals we won was Tyler Mason’s 13.06-second run for the silver in the sprint hurdles. It is an area record and the second fastest time ever by a junior. Jaheel Hyde bagged Jamaica’s only gold with a 49.29-second world-leading performance in the 400-metre hurdles, breaking his own national junior record of 49.49 set at Champs 2014.

In some quarters people are seeing the performance as a failure. Some say we are in decline but is that really the case?

When we look at what obtains currently, Jamaica has had a good long run as sprint kings. We have dominated the sprints from the youth level to the senior level for almost a decade and not too long ago, Jamaica boasted the top three men in the 100m and top five in the 200m. At the high school level we have athletes like Jevaughn Matherson and Nathaniel Bann, Chad Walker and others who are ready to take that step forward in a few years’ time.

Then we have kids like Andrew Fisher, Kemarley Brown, Julian Forte, and Kemar Bailey-Cole, who are all a step away from filling any breach left behind when Usain Bolt, Asafa Powell, Nesta Carter and Michael Frater finally walk away after years of yeoman service to their country.

On the female side things are not as clear and maybe there will be a few more years of waiting until we can find suitable replacements for aging stars Veronica Campbell Brown, Kerron Stewart, and Sherone Simpson. Shelly Ann Frazer-Pryce, the current Olympic and World Champion has a full championship cycle left and in that time perhaps athletes like Carrie Russell, Natasha Morrison, and high school sprinters Jonielle Smith, Kimone Shaw, and Shauna Helps will step forward to fill the void.

Yes, there are fears that the Jamaican golden era is winding to an inevitable close but does it mean we are in decline or is it that we need to understand and embrace some basic truths. Because of the size of the population, estimated to be about 2.7 million, prodigious talent will not happen as soon as one set is ready to retire. Sometimes it takes a while because nothing in sports in truly linear. Take a totally random sport like the NFL, for example. A truly elite quarterback or running back doesn’t emerge every single season. A lot of prospects emerge but they disappear just as quickly. Similarly, not every generation is going to produce a Bolt, Powellm Carter or Frater. No. Sometimes it takes time and in the case of Bolt, sometimes it will take a generation or two.

Could we do a better job is channeling and developing talent? Of course! But that often takes a bit of vision, some forward planning and cash, all of which Jamaica doesn’t seem to have much of. There were, for example, several issues that may have influenced the performances of Jamaica’s junior athletes in Oregon.

The male sprinters, I understand, arrived on Sunday and had one day to get ready for competition that began on Tuesday. To many it might seem like nothing but travelling across time zones can have an adverse effect on an athlete’s ability to perform. The travel itself, would have been a challenge. As Dr. Neil Gardener, a former athlete explains, travelling dehydrates an athlete. Sitting in an air-conditioned airport and in a pressurized airplane can seriously dehydrate an athlete’s body and this can take perhaps as long as 48 hours to recover from. This would explain why the sprinters looked so flat in competition and why many looked a lot better on the final day of competition by which time their bodies would have sufficiently recovered.

A long season, injuries,  breaking for exams could also have had an an impact on the athletes’ preparation. Take 2013 World Youth 100m hurdles champion, Jonique Thompson, for example; she spent most the season battling injury which hampered her overall preparation. That she managed to clock 13.42 but just failed to make it to the final speaks more to her personal situation than anything to do with a system in decline.

Let’s look at what our athletes did. Jaheel Hyde world-leading 49.29s in the 400mh. Tyler Mason, an area record and personal best 13.06, the second fastest time ever run by a junior. It took a world record 12.99s to beat him. Michael Ohara 20.31s (w) and 20.45, the latter a personal best. The relay teams all ran season bests. That doesn’t sound like athletes in decline to me.

In Eugene, the Americans unleashed on us their latest batch of potential future stars. Will they all transition successfully to the senior level? Only time can answer that question. Until then however, let us not go all Chicken Little and embrace reality that it takes time to develop talent. Nothing great happens overnight.