Jamaica at the Olympics

24 Jul 2008

Jamaica Observer

The world’s greatest sporting spectacle, the Olympics, will be held in Beijing next month. Jamaica will be taking 51 track and field athletes there, including 39 sprinters. And Jamaicans, both those at home and those of us overseas, will be expecting those athletes to make our hearts swell with pride and bring home the medals. Despite being a small island, Jamaica regularly gets more Olympic medals than countries many times its size and wealth. Jamaica has produced this year’s four fastest women at 200 meters, four of the top six at 100 meters and the fastest man in both events in the the sensational Usain Bolt. But modern athletics has been overshadowed by doping scandals and even Jamaica is not free of suspicion.

Jamaica’s prowess in athletics is no recent phenomenon.  In 1948, Arthur Wint won Jamaica’s first Olympic gold medal, in the 400 meters. Herb McKinley won four medals from 1948 to 1952, and the incomparable Merlene Ottey won nine medals from 1980 to 2000. Usain Bolt is the current pride of Jamaica. He broke Asafa Powell’s 100-meter world record by four-hundredths of second when he ran a 9.72 in May (even though the 200 is actually Bolt’s best event). Among the women, Jamaicans ran the world’s fastest 100 each of the last three years: Sherone Simpson in 2006, Veronica Campbell-Brown in 2007 and Kerron Stewart in 2008.

The problem is that, in countries all over the world, athletic achievement is being increasingly discredited by subsequent admissions of drug use. More than a dozen elite sprinters have been penalized for using performance-enhancing drugs in recent years, notably the Americans Marion Jones, who was humiliated by having to return five medals from the 2000 Olympics, and Justin Gatlin and Tim Montgomery, who were each at times the world’s fastest man.

The list of those barred from competing is long and includes Jamaica-born sprinters who trained elsewhere e.g. Ben Johnson in Canada, Linford Christie and Dwain Chambers in England.  Jerome Young and Patrick Jarrett (who were coached in the United States by another Jamaican expatriate Trevor Graham) also fell foul of the authorities. Merlene Ottey failed a steroid test in 1999, while training in Europe. But this was later ruled a laboratory error. Trevor Graham( a 1988 relay silver medallist for Jamaica) started a track camp in North Carolina featuring Marion Jones, who had passed more than 160 drug tests but finally acknowledged steroid use. In San Francisco in May, Graham was convicted on one felony count of lying to federal agents and awaits sentencing Sept. 5. Marion Jones is due to be released from prison in September after serving a six-month sentence for lying to federal investigators. Two Jamaican sprinters who trained in the United States failed steroids tests when they came home for national championships: Patrick Jarrett in 2001 and Steve Mullings, who ran for Mississippi State, in 2004. Other Jamaican stars, including Asafa Powell’s older brother Donovan, have tested positive for stimulants.

The problem is that Jamaica does not have an independent out-of-competition testing program for its athletes. And it has not joined the Caribbean Regional Anti-Doping Organisation. However the International Association of Athletics Federations (IAFF) does come to Jamaica and test its athletes regularly. Sceptics point out, however, that Jamaican athletes are less likely to be tested out of season than others, that some local officials may collude with athletes to protect them from visiting testers and that many illegal stimulants either do not show up in tests or disappear from the bloodstream in a matter of weeks.

Just as shortage of money means that Jamaica cannot provide the training facilities that other countries have, financial constraints mean it is difficult for Jamaica to set up the sort domestic drug-testing program that is needed. Maybe our best hope for world class, but drug-free, Jamaican athletes is for the would-be Olympians themselves to remember that they run in the footsteps of legends like Arthur Wint. They did it without drugs and so can our modern day sporting heroes.

 

 

 

 

 



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