HOW COULD SUCH A THING HAPPEN JAAA?

Prior to the lead up to the elections last November to select a new administration for the Jamaica Athletic Administrative Association (JAAA), the respective candidates campaigned on the platform the country’s achievements on the track have far outpaced the way the sport was being governed. Change, the candidates said, was essential if Jamaica was to going to continue to sustain its incredible accomplishments on the track.

What happened to Hansle Parchment on Saturday night just prior to him competing in the men’s 110-metre hurdles would suggest that either the candidates were just paying lip service to those pronouncements or they clearly lack an understanding of what it will take for administrators to catch up with the athletes. It also suggests that whatever they need to do to get up to speed better happen soon or the sport is going to suffer.

Parchment, the Olympic bronze medalist and this year’s world leader in the sprint hurdles, was coming into these trials looking like one of the men to beat at the World Championships in Moscow. He was demonstrating the kind of pedigree that many people believe he possesses; the potential to be perhaps the fastest sprint hurdler of all time. The 13.05 he ran just a couple weeks ago was something he planned to build on, and based on information I received in the days leading up to these national championships, he may have gone even faster on Saturday night, breaking that 13-second threshold thus joining an elite list of men who have accomplished the feat. He could have joined his contemporaries Aries Merritt, the world record holder; Jason Richardson, Liu Xiang, Dayron Robles, and David Oliver and some of the past greats like Renaldo Nehemiah, Allen Johnson, Mark Crear, Colin Jackson, Dominique Arnold,  Terrence Trammell, Jack Pierce and Ladjii Doucoure.

Now, that prospect seems uncertain because on the night of Saturday, June 22, Parchment, and the other talented sprinter hurdlers like Andrew Riley and Dwight Thomas, were forced to warm up in darkness. Why? We are waiting to hear from the JAAAs. In the meantime, Riley, the former Calabar and University of Illinois standout, who is also poised to become one of the best in the world have laid the blame squarely at their feet.

“(I’m) a bit disappointed that Hansle was not in the final, but you have to put that blame on the organisers,” Riley told track and field website Track Alerts.com. “At the warm-up track, there was no blocks and lights. Jamaica needs to take care of their athletes.”

The website also spoke with Thomas. “I know they don’t intentionally do that to hurt the athletes,” said Thomas, while saying he hopes they won’t have a repeat of the situation.

According to the website Parchment’s coach Fitzroy Coleman told Reuters “He (Parchment) was warming up and twisted his left ankle on one hurdle, which was lying around. The lighting could have been better at the warm-up track.”

The consensus was that the lighting needed to have been better and the general conditions too. Now, I understand the financial constraints but having the athletes warm up almost blind is absolutely absurd. If the organizers had given it some thought, seeing that the hurdlers warm up with obstacles that makes the warm up potentially dangerous, if there were concerns about paying for the lighting, why not run the event earlier in the afternoon when they could have warmed up in natural night. All they would have had to do is reschedule the 200-metre and 400-mete heats to accommodate the shift in the schedule.

As it is right now, Parchment awaits the results of an x-ray that was done on the night which will help determine the extent of the damage. We can only hope that it is not as bad as it could have been and that Parchment will be able to resume training soon. Otherwise, this apparent bungling on the part of the JAAA could potentially derail the young man’s season and further blight the island’s medal prospects in Moscow this summer.