21-Y-O BENCHMARK!
MVP’s James notes age-defining improvement for top sprinters
ACCORDING TO MVP Track Club President, Bruce James, there is no straight line from being a fast young sprinter to being a champion. Therefore, James preaches patience to those who expect the world from the next generation of Jamaican speed merchants.
Asked to identify the barriers that young sprinters face, James began: “The biggest challenge is that everybody matures and develops at a different rate and those who mature and develop earlier, people seem to believe that there is a linear progression that will take place. It’s just been proven that it’s almost never linear in terms of progression and that being the fastest at age 10 doesn’t mean you’ll be the fastest at age 15, and certainly doesn’t mean you’re going to be the fastest at age 20 and 25.”
James added: ”The second challenge is quite often having run fast when you’re young. You may actually have gotten the very best that your body can give as a youngster and therefore not have as much upside left. You may or may not.”
He also noted: “A number of the best Jamaican athletes, when they become seniors, have a significant improvement once they get into their twenties. So a Usain Bolt, even though he was running sub-20 before he was 20 years old, after 20 years old, he dropped down 19.6, and 19.5 and 19.4 and so on. So something happens around 20, 21 where there is a significant improvement.”
Bolt exploded with a world record sprint double at the 2008 Olympics. He was 21 at the time.
THE KEY AGE
“The key seems to happen right about age 21,” James went on, “where there is a significant improvement or adjustment in your early twenties where there’s that jump, that move, that increase, that improvement that shows that you can now handle the senior level.”
James presented 2012 Olympic silver medallist Yohan Blake as an example.
“So a Yohan Blake at 10.11 as a junior had to be a sub-10 man to win the World Championships in 2011, becoming the youngest to do that. But he had to make a big jump from his 10.11, so it’s not enough to be fast as a junior to go on to be great at the senior level,” he said of the sprinter who moved his 100-metre best from 10.11 as an under 20 athlete to 9.89 in 2010, the year he turned 21.
Notably, Dennis Johnson and Donald Quarrie both matched world records at 21.
Understandably, James is optimistic about the prospects for Oblique Seville, the Racers Track Club sprinter who reached the Olympic 100-metre semi-finals in Tokyo, Japan.
“He’s extremely exciting because he’s also born in the 2000s, born in March 2001. So he was still just 20 years old when he ran his senior PB of 10.04 in his semi-finals,” he noted.
Seville turns 21 on March 16, 2022.