Blake expects strong World Cup showing
Jamaica will field a strong team at the inaugural Athletics World Cup, to be held in London on July 14 and 15. That’s the view of Dr Warren Blake, president of the Jamaica Athletics Administrative Association. According to him, the team strength is derived from the presence of many stars at last week’s National Championships.
Blake made this observation at the recent launch of the Jamaica Under-18 Invitational, which was held at the National Stadium on weekend.
“The Jamaican team in London should be fairly strong because most of our top athletes came out”, he related. “Just a few instances our top athletes couldn’t come out and they indicated the reasons why they couldn’t participate.”
Among those victorious at the Nationals were double Olympic sprint champion Elaine Thompson, and Commonwealth champions Ronald Levy, Janieve Russell and Fedrick Dacres as well as Commonwealth medal winners Shericka Jackson, Natoya Goule and Danielle Williams. That has convinced Blake that Jamaica will do well in the eightnation team competition in London.
“I’m expecting that we’ll be placing in the top half of those eight countries”, he hoped.
ADDING INTEREST
The competing teams will come from the United States, China, Germany, France, Poland, South Africa and Jamaica, the top eight at last year’s World Championships.
He also expressed the view that the Athletics World Cup has achieved its goal of adding interest in a season that has no World Championships or Olympic Games.
“I think it has worked and I think we’ll have a very good competition there”, asserted the head of the Jamaican track and field federation.
The days of the new athletics meet clash with the FIFA World Cup and Blake said: “Competition against the World Cup is difficult.” Nevertheless, he is hopeful. “Ironically, the two days of the competition happen to be on the days of the third-place play-off and final”, he noted, “but it’s later on in the evening so there won’t be a clash of times, clash of dates maybe but not a clash of times.”
“So I suspect that the track and field fans will come out and support the competition.”
One Jamaican senior champion who isn’t likely to be there is 400 metre winner Christopher Taylor, who was named this week to the team for the World Under-20 Championships, set for July 10-15 in Finland. When asked whether Taylor would be in London or Tampere, host of the Under-20 meet, Blake said, “Our indication is that he is going to the World Juniors.”