Shericka Jackson focused on World Champs
...but still undecided about events to contest
WITH the National Senior Championships and the World Athletics Championships just a few weeks away, dynamic Jamaican sprinter Shericka Jackson is still to decide which events she will be competing in at the July 15 to 24 event set for Eugene, Oregon.
“Coach [Paul Francis] and I haven’t decided which event [I will compete in] as yet. I have run a few 400m and I just opened my season at 100m. I am supposed to run a 200m at Doha. I am healthy, so I am just grateful,” Jackson said.
Jackson, who won two World Championships and one Olympic bronze medal in the 400m before sprinting to another bronze in the 100m at the Tokyo 2020 Olympic Games, is also the seventh-fastest Jamaican in the 200m, with a personal best of 21.87 seconds.
The 27-year-old got her season underway in the 100m at Saturday’s JAAA/SDF Jubilee Series meet at the National Stadium where she clocked a solid 11.00 seconds to win the event, this after cantering to 11.37s in the semi-final earlier in the evening.
However, she explains that while there is a preference for the shorter sprints, her training programme has been designed to ensure optimum preparation across her full range of events.
“The good thing is that I am still training with the quarter-milers, so coach and I will have a sit-down and decide which event is the best. But right now, we are leaning more to the 100m-200m than the 400m, but we’ll just have to wait and see,” said Jackson.
Whatever she decides to run, Jackson will come up against fierce competition at home — especially in the short sprints and abroad. She underlined that she is focused on the task at hand, especially after acknowledging that a lapse in concentration taught her a tough lesson in Tokyo last year when she crashed out of the 200m.
“I am always focused. You realise [that] any time I am not focused at the line, talking to myself, I will definitely run bad — and that happened to me at the Olympic Games in the 200m. So, I am definitely focused. I am healthy, I ran 11-flat and I’m just grateful,” Jackson added.
After breezing through her first run out in the short sprint, Jackson revealed that even though there are two major championships this summer with the Commonwealth Games in Birmingham, England, set to begin just days after the World Championships comes to a close, her main focus is on the Oregon event.
“For me, it’s one step at a time. Right now, the main focus is [the] World Championships and then after World Championships … I will see what goes, but the main focus right now is to make the World Championships team,” she stated.
Jackson won bronze in a Jamaican sweep of the women’s 100m at the Olympic Games last year, before missing out on the 200m final after a badly judged semi-final. She quickly recovered from that disappointment to win gold in the 4x100m final and bronze in the 4x400m final.