Jamaican sprint stars have struggled at Paris Games
Silver medalist Kishane Thompson, of Jamaica, stands on the podium after the men's 100-meter final at the 2024 Summer Olympics on Aug. 5, 2024, in Saint-Denis, France.The midpoint of the Olympic track meet used to be time for Jamaican sprint stars – Usain Bolt, Shelly-Ann Fraser-Pryce and all the rest – to catch their breath, recover from their victory parties, then start gearing up for more.
And in a twist hardly anyone on the island could have ever imagined, Jamaica actually had more medals from field events than from sprinting. The team that won 15 of the 24 Olympic medals in the women’s 100 and 200 between 2008 and 2021 will go home with none this year. It will mark the first time since 1976 the country hasn’t won a women’s medal in either of those events.
Exactly a month later, Jackson, the second-fastest woman of all time at 200 metres, pulled up lame in a race in Hungary. She arrived in Paris, only to pull out of the 100 first, then the 200. Even had she raced, there were questions as to what kind of impact she would have had in the 200 given her pedestrian 22.29-second run at Olympic trials.
“It’s a very young team,” said Lanae Tava-Thomas, another relay candidate, who is 23 and finished fifth in the 200-metre semi-final. “We definitely have time to develop. It’s going to be a very strong team when we get actually fully developed.”There was a time when Merlene Ottey seemed irreplaceable. Then along came Veronica Campbell-Brown, who won eight Olympic medals, including three golds, over a stretch that covered 2004-16.
If the next Fraser is out there, she hasn’t arrived yet, though Thompson’s relatively quick emergence on the men’s side – he was a virtual unknown outside the island before June – shows how fast things can change.
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