Whatever the weather
THOSE WHO believe Jamaicans should stop going to the Penn Relays should learn a lot this week.
The weather there in Philadelphia, where those relays are being staged for the 124th time, is unlike anything Jamaicans experience at home. Curiously, the forecast sounds chillingly similar to the temperatures encountered by our national teams at the last two World Championships.
In London last year, scene of Arthur Wint’s historic Olympic gold medal in 1948, the weather turned against our home-based sprinters. The outturn was Jamaica’s lowest medal take in decades, with US-based hurdler supreme Omar McLeod winning the only gold. Lest we forget, the 13-degree chill put the brakes on the incomparable Usain Bolt, Yohan Blake, Ronald Levy and Anniesha McLaughlin-Whilby.
Bolt and McLaughlin-Whilby, heroes of the 2002 World Junior Championships in Kingston, were left on the track, baton in hand, when relay medals were all but guaranteed.
The freeze was on in March this year in snow-bound Birmingham, host of the IAAF World Indoor Championships. There, the medals won by Jamaica came from triple jumper Kimberly Williams and shot putter Danniel Thomas-Dodd, who live and train in coldweather locales. It’s undeniable.
This week’s Philadelphia forecast predicts temperatures between eight and 20 degrees Celsius.
The train-at-home programme has proven its value and should be extended, perhaps by more of our colleges copying the Utech/MVP template and facilitating the growth of champions here. That isn’t under the microscope here. Instead, the intent is to advise against the abandonment of important steps in the ascent to greatness.
CONFRONT COLD WEATHER
The Carifta Games, where our youngsters experience national team competition overseas, often for the first time, is one of those steps. The Penn Relays is another. As shown in London and Birmingham, cold weather is the soft underbelly of our train-at-home programme and the only way to solve the problem is to confront it.
It’s true that the Penn Relays organisers benefit when Jamaicans fill the stands at Franklin Field, but that goes both ways. Even now, in the age of the Internet and visits by US college coaches to the ISSA/GraceKennedy Boys and Girls Athletics Championships and other meets, some scholarship deals are brought to conclusion at Penn and studentathletes often gain valuable exposure by way of tours organised by overseas past students. Speaking from a purely athletic point of view, exposure to Penn’s unpredictable weather is vital to the progress of future champions.
After Birmingham and London, there shouldn’t be any doubters.