The Betty Black Blog

Everyone is probably aware that our Lightening Bolt broke his own records in the recent World Championships: the 100m with 9.58 and the 200m with 19.19. Overall we took home 7 Gold, 4 Silver and 2 Bronze to end up just below the USA in total medal count. In the 2008 Olympics we sent a mere 57 athletes to the Games and brought home 11 medals. The US sent 596 athletes and won 110 medals, China’s 804 won 100 medals. The New York Times goes even further with a graph showing countries’ per capita Gold Medals. At the Olympics, Bolt earned three Gold Medals and broke three records.

On a pro-rated basis we beat them all! How do we do it? There’s a humorous email doing the circuits supposedly coming from the World Anti-Doping Agency stating that yam, dasheen, cornmeal porridge, Supligen®, etc. have been added to the list of banned substances. Is it our food, our water, the air we breathe? Or is it something in the very soul of each athlete? The je ne sais quoi in Arthur Wint and Herb McKenley, in Don Quarrie, Merlene Ottey, Deon Hemmings and, by the bucket full, in Usain Bolt and our current crop of Super Achievers? Or might it actually be in our very genes.

Once in a lifetime something happens that no one can explain: a person is born at just the right time and with just the right talents; fate, luck and opportunity line up to propel this person to exactly where they should be.  It doesn’t matter if they are born into privilege in New York or London or modest circumstances in a country village somewhere off the map. Something happens which cannot be explained.

In Jamaica’s Cockpit Country grow rare and unusual species which are found nowhere else on Earth. In the foothills of the Cockpit Country, in the parish of Trelawny, lies a village called Sherwood Content. It is here that Wellesley and Jennifer Bolt owned the general store and raised their three children, Sadeeki, Sherine and Usain. Young Usain was full of energy and thought of nothing but sport. He would shirk his chores in favour of a game of football (soccer) or cricket or races up and down the dirt roads. By the age of 12 he was the fastest runner at the local primary school…ever!

Usain was sent to William Knibb High which has a good sports reputation. Here is where the stars started to line up. Usain was keen on cricket but his cricket coach was blown away by his speed on the pitch and urged him to try out for track and field. The track coach, former Olympic runner Pablo McNeil, saw the raw talent and immediately started preparing Usain for Champs. For just about a century, the Boys and Girls Athletic Championships has been the testing ground for all aspiring athletes in Jamaica. High school students from across the Island take their athletes and their colours very seriously when it’s time for Champs. At the age of fourteen Usain took part in his first Champs and won silver. Mr McNeil is reputed to have been frustrated by Usain’s lack of commitment to training as he saw an unbelievable potential in him. But then how many adolescents do you know who are committed to anything serious.

That year he went to his first regional games, the CARIFTA Games and won silver in the 200m and 400m. In the World Junior Championships at that time he was more interested in having fun than qualifying and one of his now famous practical jokes required police intervention. In 2002 the World Junior Championships were held in Kingston and it was then that the gangly fifteen year old was first christened “Lightening Bolt” by the Jamaican press. He won the 200m in 20.61 and became the youngest world junior medalist ever. He also helped the 4×100m and the 4×400m win silver. He so impressed the International community that he was awarded the IAAF Rising Star Award for 2002.

The following year, in the World Junior Championships, he set a record in the 200m. At that time the world 200m record holder, American Michael Johnson, worried that Bolt’s handlers might be pressuring him too much and should look to his potential four or five years down the line. At sixteen Usain was clocking times that Johnson himself had not reached ‘til twenty.

The stars line up even further for the University of Technology in Kingston has just completed their MVP Centre in an effort to encourage our world class athletes to train at home. Usain declined scholarships to several American Universities insisting that he wanted to stay at home so at seventeen he came to Kingston to the MVP at UTec

Though he had travelled in his junior career that had been under controlled circumstances. He was now a teenager from the country in a big city and behaved as any other teenager would, preferring partying and eating fast food to training. A hamstring injury in 2004 took him out of the 2004 World Junior Championships and led to his poor performance in the 2004 Olympics but young Usain was now on the World Stage.

Usain enjoys life and his success and it shows. He parties hard when he’s not training and enjoys hamming for the cameras and the media love him! Somehow he has infected his teammates with his joy and his ability to not take himself too seriously. Jamaica’s athletic team has become one big happy family. There are spats as with every family, but the team on a whole get on well together and feed off each other’s talent and success so that when one wins, it energises everyone else to win. Even the serious Asafa, product of not one, but two, ministers of religion, has now started to lighten up and ham for the cameras. In fact, at the recent World Championships we saw not just the Jamaican team but athletes from all over doing their own little shows at the starting block

Our home grown International track and media star is infecting the whole sport with his sense of fun and his enthusiasm for life!

Read more about Jamaica at Jamaica-Allspice.com