GB MEDALLIST MASON DIES: NEWS
A BRITISH Olympic medallist was killed in a motorbike crash yesterday after partying with Usain Bolt in Jamaica.
Germaine Mason was thought to be riding at the front of a convoy of several athletes, including 100m world record holder Bolt.
The 34-year-old athlete, who won a silver medal in the high jump at the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing, lost control of his Honda CBR motorbike as he drove through the capital Kingston at 4.20am.
Unconfirmed reports suggested he was trying to avoid a vehicle that had lost control on the other side of the road. He was pronounced dead at the scene.
Bolt, a close friend of Mason, stopped at the crash scene moments later, according to reports in Jamaica.
The pair were also with Jamaican sprinter Michael Frater, who won gold in the 100m relay at the London 2012 Olympics, and former Bolton Wanderers footballer Ricardo Gardner. They also stopped at the scene.
Mason, who leaves behind a fiveyear-old son, was born in Jamaica but was able to represent Great Britain because his father is English. His silver in the high jump was one of only four medals won by the team in track and field events at Beijing.
Mason retired from the sport last year and returned to Jamaica to live closer to relatives.
He had just left a party featuring Soca music – a blend of soul and calypso that originated in Trinidad and Tobago – and was driving back into the centre of Kingston when the accident happened. Yesterday some of Britain’s greatest Olympians paid tribute to Mason on social media.
Dame Jessica Ennis-Hill, the poster-girl for the London Olympics, tweeted: ‘This is just awful. Such sad news.’
Former heptathlon champion Denise Lewis added: ‘A tragic loss of such a fun and loving person.’
Mason burst on to the athletics scene in 2000 when he won silver at the Junior World Championships in Chile while representing Jamaica. After switching allegiance to Great Britain in 2006, he lost his lottery funding a year later because of underwhelming performances – only to prove doubters wrong by winning silver in Beijing.
Knee surgery at the end of that year wrecked his winter training preparations and then his brother, Andre, was jailed in 2009 for his part in a gang murder of a 22-year- old student in West London. British Athletics senior high jump coach Fuzz Caan, who worked closely with Mason, called him an ‘outstanding athlete and a truly lovely man’.
Mason’s death comes less than four months after two other British athletes – sprinters James Ellington and Nigel Levine – were seriously injured in a motorcycle crash in Tenerife.