Sprinter found another gear
For someone who’s racing through the present, Khamica Bingham sure has a firm grasp of Canadian sprinting history.
The 21-year-old sprinter from Brampton, Ont., is the freshly minted national 100-metre champion, having run a personal best time of 11.19 seconds on Friday night, to win the title at the Canadian Track and Field Championships at the University of Alberta’s Foote Field.
With the Pan American Games upcoming in Toronto, Bingham wasn’t trying to nail a particular time. She will try to shave her time closer to the 11-second mark in Toronto, actually. Last Friday night, Bingham just wanted to win the race.
“It (the time) was a little bit of a surprise, actually, because I didn’t have the greatest start,” said Bingham, who is training in Edmonton this week to prepare for the Track Town Classic one-day meet on Sunday.
“One of my teammates, Crystal (Emmanuel) was ahead of me, so I had to find another gear. And I didn’t know that I had that gear.”
She found it, overtook Emmanuel in the late stages of the race and punched her ticket to the IAAF World Championships in Athletics in Beijing in late August.
As she whittles hundredths and tenths of seconds off her best times, Bingham, a national-level gymnast who switched to track in 2010, has a clear objective in mind — Angela Bailey’s Canadian 100-metre record of 10.98 seconds, a mark set in 1987.
“There hasn’t been anyone who has run 11.1 in Canada since, like the 1980s, I would say,” Bingham said. “So, the fact that I can run what basically hasn’t been run since the ’80s now, at just 21, is pretty amazing.”
Key members of Canada’s 1980s sprint teams, male and female, were caught in the net cast by the Dubin Commission into the use of performance-enhancing substances. The men’s team, led by Donovan Bailey and Bruny Surin, had a resurgence in the mid- to late 1990s. There was no comparable to the Bailey-Surin tandem on the women’s side during those years.
More recently, Canada’s top female sprinters have been 100-metre hurdlers like Perdita Felicien, Priscilla Lopes-Schliep, Phylicia George and Nikkita Holder.
Bingham, a precocious talent, is part of an emerging Canadian female sprint group that has become a factor in major 4x100-metre relay competitions.
“I like to think that I’m en route,” Bingham said. “I’m only 21 years old and usually the time when female sprinters are at their strongest is when we’re in our mid- to late-20s.”
At 19, Bingham anchored Canada’s 4x100m relay team that set a Canadian record of 42.99 seconds at the IAAF World’s in Moscow. The same lineup of women — Emmanuel, Kimberly Hyacinthe, Shai-Anne Davis and Bingham — finished a close fourth at the IAAF World Relays in Nassau, Bahamas, on May 3, in 42.85.
Bingham again ran the anchor leg, and with some panache, at that, overtaking Trinidad and Tobago and Brazil down the stretch to finish one one-hundredth of a second behind Great Britain (42.84), who won bronze.
“She’s mentally tough,” said Desai Williams, who coaches Bingham and other sprinters at York University, and also coaches of Canada’s 4x100m women’s team. “That’s where the crossover from gymnastics comes in.
“In gymnastics, you go on the (balance) beams and you’re going to fall 25 times before you get it. It’s not an issue for her to fail. And she likes to win, that’s the one piece with her, she loves winning. She likes the challenges.”
Williams says Bingham, as a relative newcomer to sprinting, “is raw to it. She’s just started to figure out things. Her adaptation to the program is great. The upside is huge.”
Bingham will face a significant challenge on Sunday at the Track Town Classic, where she will run the 100 metres against U.S. sprint superstar Allyson Felix, as well as Jamaican athletes Sherone Simpson and Samantha Henry Robinson. Felix, whose specialty is the 200 metres, has won 12 gold medals in Olympic and World Championship competition in her career, speaking of challenges.
“It means a great, big deal,” Bingham said. “I’m actually beside Allyson Felix (her lane assignment) and she’s an American legend.
“It just kind of motivates me. I believe in myself. I believe that I can run with these girls, that I can beat these girls.
“It’s like a practice run, getting me ready for Pan Ams, and I’m just going to gain all this experience. I’m just going to go out there and have fun and see if I can run even faster.
“I am so excited. There is just something about competing against international athletes or at major championships that is so exciting to me. I’m targeting (Felix), just trying to have the best race of my life.”