GRACE/STETHS meet to undergo name change
STARTING next year the GRACE/STETHS Invitational track and field meet will be known as the Olivier/smith Invitational in honour of the men who started the meet in 1983.
St Elizabeth Technical High School (STETHS) Principal Keith Wellington made the announcement in the presence of former Head Coach Mike Olivier, who was honoured at several events staged by past students, leading up to the meet.
Eldemire Smith passed last year, but Olivier, who was at the meet for the first time in years, was overwhelmed by the honour, saying it was “a tremendous feeling, I am most appreciative”.
Wellington told the Jamaica Observer the idea for the renaming of the meet came out of discussions between the school and a number of their past athletics greats, including intermediate hurdlers Winthrop Graham and Ian Weakley.
He said a number of the athletes had been at STETHS.
“We have been using the opportunity to recognise both Eldemire and Olivier; it’s a process started with the past athletes,” he said, “recognising, especially with the passing of Mr Smith, that these gentlemen would have done so much for them as individuals and for the school as a whole and wanted to use the opportunity to recognise them in their own way. And having the discussions with them, and in looking back at what they would have contributed, one of the things that we recognised was that both gentlemen were the person who started the STETHS meet in 1983.
“We didn’t have development meets like we have now. I think three or four meets that were on the JAAA [Jamaica Athletics Administrative Association] calendar, but they started with a meet where they invited a few schools and that meet grown into what it is now, 40-plus years after.”
Wellington says the GRACE/STETHS meet “had now established itself on the calendar and it looks like something that will be around for a while and, therefore, we thought that it would be a good idea to keep their memories alive by attaching their names to the meet.”
Olivier, who coached at STETHS between 1981 and 1997, said at the time they started the meet they were not thinking that one day it would grow to this level and be named after them.
“We just wanted to get a meet to satisfy the needs of the people in the west and to cut down our costs to go to Kingston,” he said. “So we started this meet in 1983 because every weekend we had to go to ‘town’, every Saturday. It cost us a lot. So we wanted to meet here.”
There were just four schools at the first staging.
“We started with four schools in 1983,” Olivier said. “We started with Mannings School, Holmwood Technical, and Kingston College, along with us, but we grew significantly. The next year we had 27 schools, and now it’s much bigger than that.”
He says his legacy at STETHS was to have made it into a “more rounded sports school,” not only dependent on football and cricket.
“When I came to STETHS there was no tradition of track and field, and they were just about to get to the top in cricket and also up there in football,” Olivier said. “I think what I’ve brought is just a recognition of STETHS as a complete sports institution.
“We have been able to produce quite a few Olympians and World Athletics Champions medallist.
“The main thing we have achieved, though, is our victories at the Penn Relays, which helped forge a bond with the past students who lived in the USA, which resulted in better funding for the programme. And so my biggest achievement was to get STETHS recognised internationally and to create opportunities for our athletes.”
Olivier’s first year at the Inter-secondary Schools Sports Association/ Gracekennedy Boys’ and Girls’ Athletics Championships saw them finish in 32nd place, with five points. They moved to fifth, with 32 points, the following year and stayed in the top five for some years after.