Gwan, nuh!
Jamaica dominates the sprint races in Track and Field at the Beijing Olympics:
- * The Gold and World Record double for Usain Bolt in the men’s 100m and men’s 200m
- * Gold and World Records in the men’s 4×100m relay and women’s 400m hurdles.
* Gold and 2 silvers (dead heat) in the women’s 100m - a clean sweep- * A clean sweep of the men’s and women’s 100m and 200m gold medals
- * Gold and Bronze in the women’s 200m
- Silver in the women’s 400m
- * Bronze in the women’s 4×400m relay
Usain Bolt was definitely the star of the show with his world record double in the 100 and 200.
YouTube - Michael Johnson reaction to Usain Bolt’s run
But the girls did their part too:
BEIJING (AFP) — Veronica Campbell-Brown completed a sprint grand slam for Jamaica when she defended her Olympic 200 metres title gold on a day of heroes and villains on Thursday.
It gave Jamaica all four sprint titles after the world’s fastest man Usain Bolt sprinted into a class of his own taking the men’s 100m-200m double in world-record time and Shelly-Ann Fraser won the women’s 100m.
For the first time since the boycotted 1980 Moscow Games the United States hasn’t won at least one of the four glamour sprints.
The immense success is even raising hope that the sprinters can become role models and inspirations for youth in their homeland:
With Bolt shattering world records to claim gold in the men’s 100 and 200 meters, and Jamaica making a clean sweep of the medals in the women’s 100 meters, the Caribbean island is fast earning the title of the world’s fastest country. That reputation is music to the ears of Jamaicans who, for years, have become more accustomed to hearing their country discussed for its sky-high murder rate and for a dancehall reggae pop-culture that has, in recent years, glorified bullets and brutality.
A growing number of Jamaican citizens and officials, in fact, are counting on their world-conquering young sprinters — none of whom has failed a drug test, and who often speak out against the gunplay at home — to supplant self-styled “roughneck” singers as role models, and help reduce the country’s horrific levels of violent crime. “These athletes can speak to the young people in our more troubled communities, especially since many of them come from those communities,” says Jamaican sports writer Carole Beckford, author of Keeping Jamaica’s Sport on Track. “We can’t wait for them to come home as a result.”
Few Jamaican athletes are in a better position to have that kind of effect than Shelly-Ann Fraser, who won the women’s 100 meters last weekend, the first gold for her country in that event. (She was followed in second and third place by fellow Jamaicans Sherone Simpson and Kerron Stewart.) To international track-and-field enthusiasts, Fraser, 21, seemed to emerge from nowhere; but to Jamaicans, she’s the girl who used to train barefooted in her home neighborhood of Waterhouse, a particularly tough ghetto on the outskirts of Kingston. One of the first things she did after her Beijing victory was grab her cellphone and call her mother Maxine back in Waterhouse. Maxine, a street vendor and former sprinter herself, is outspoken about the violence and police abuse plaguing their community, and she often uses media interviews about her daughter to implore Jamaicans to “put down the guns.” After Shelly-Ann’s win, she urged them to recognize that “good things can come out of the ghetto. Good things can come out of Waterhouse.” Shelly-Ann told a Jamaican daily, “My mother is probably one of the biggest reasons why I’m running.”
Everyone seems to enjoy the Jamaican success and love the fun celebrations, spearheaded by Usain Bolt.
BEIJING, Aug 22 (Reuters) - Jamaica’s success in athletics will be one of the most remembered aspects of the Beijing Olympics and it could also mark the start of a new era for the sport, one where running is fun again.
The dominance of Jamaica in Beijing has been assisted by a below-par performance from U.S sprinters and it could prove to be just the boost the sport needed.
After doping scandals tarnished the reputation of too many in the sport, the success of the heavily drug-tested Usain Bolt and the impressive team of female sprinters, has given the sport a necessary image makeover.
The sight of Jamaicans clearly enjoying every minute of their success, celebrating with freedom and joy has been in stark contrast to the often intense and closed manner in which U.S athletes have marked their victories in the past.
In Jamaica, the results have been celebrated by convoys of cars, wild partying and outbursts of genuine national pride, all captured by cameras and broadcast around the world.
Everyone, that is, except IOC President and spoilsport Jacques Rogge
Double sprint champion Usain Bolt was condemned on Thursday night for his showboating antics by Olympics boss Jacques Rogge, who immediately felt a backlash from the athletics world.
Jamaican Bolt, the triumphant face of the Beijing Games, pounded his chest before crossing the 100metres finishing line in a world record 9.69sec last Saturday, then made little effort to congratulate the opposition after his second world record of 19.30sec in the 200m on Wednesday.
Instead, Bolt set off on a solo victory lap, swaying to the reggae music on the loudspeakers.
boltBelgian IOC president Rogge, 66, said: ‘That’s not the way we perceive being a champion. I have no problem with him doing a show. He should show more respect for his competitors and shake hands, give a tap on the shoulder to the other ones immediately after the finish and not make gestures like the one he made in the 100m.’
But American Shawn Crawford, who won silver in the 200m, said: ‘I don’t feel like Usain is being disrespectful. If this guy has worked his tail off, every day, on his knees throwing up like I was in practice, he deserves to dance.
‘I love watching him when he does his thing. When he was introduced he was dancing and the crowd loves it. It adds a bit of sparkle and cheer.’
BBC Sport’s Steve Cram, the 1983 world champion in the 1500m, also defended Bolt. ‘He’s just done something that no other sprinter has done before,’ said Cram.
‘He is very good for the sport, he’s a young man, it’s his birthday and he’s just become a legend in the sport. He is an exuberant character and if he wants to have fun, let him do it.’
In fact, given the more grave events surrounding the Olympics host (despite certain pre-Olympic assurances), and the conflict that broke on the eve of the Olympics between Russia and Georgia, Usain Bolt seemed to some like the wrong guy to go after:
BEIJING — Jacques Rogge is so bought, so compromised, the president of the IOC doesn’t have the courage to criticize China for telling a decade of lies to land itself these Olympic Games.
All the promises made to get these Games — on Tibet, Darfur, pollution, worker safety, freedom of expression, dissident rights — turned out to be phony, perhaps as phony as the Chinese gymnasts’ birthdates Rogge was way too slow to investigate.
One of the most powerful men in sports turned the world away from his complicity. Instead, he has flexed his muscles by unloading on a powerless sprinter from a small island nation.
Rogge’s ripping of Usain Bolt’s supposed showboating in two of the most electrifying gold-medal performances of these Games has to be one of the most ill-timed and gutless acts in the modern history of the Olympics.
“That’s not the way we perceive being a champion,” Rogge said of the Jamaican sprinter. “I have no problem with him doing a show. I think he should show more respect for his competitors and shake hands, give a tap on the shoulder to the other ones immediately after the finish and not make gestures like the one he made in the 100 meters.”
Oh, this is richer than those bribes and kickbacks the IOC got caught taking.
All the powerful nations — including the United States — have carte blanche at the Games. They can pout and preen, cheat, throw bean balls, file wild complaints, break promises that got them a host bid, whatever they want. They can take turns slapping Rogge and his cronies around like rag dolls as long as the dinner with a good wine list gets paid.
A single individual sprinter? Even if you don’t like his manner, that’s whom Rogge deems it necessary to attack, to issue a worldwide condemnation?
“I understand the joy,” Rogge said. “He might have interpreted that in another way, but the way it was perceived was ‘catch me if you can.’ You don’t do that. But he’ll learn. He’s still a young man.”
Perceived by whom? Old fat cats making billions of Olympic dollars on the backs of athletes like Bolt for a century now? They get to define this? They get to lecture about learning?
Bolt is everything the Olympics are supposed to be about. He isn’t the product of some rich country, some elaborate training program that churns out gold medals by any means necessary.
He’s a breath of fresh air, a guy who came out of nowhere to enrapture the world with his athletic performance and colorful personality. This is no dead-eye product of some massive machine.
He was himself, and the world loved him for it.
So why has Jamaican Sprinting taken center stage in this Olympics? Could it be … yams?
There are a host of reasons. Aunt Lilly of Miss Lilly’s Bar and Shop in Trelawney, the parish that has produced most of the country’s great sprinters, told Time magazine it is the yellow yams they eat.
The latest theory, put forward by Dr William Aiken, head of urology at the University Hospital of the West Indies, is a high level of testosterone in Jamaicans. He says it produces great sprinting but also the highest incidence of prostate cancer in the world, a high rate of traffic accidents and a high crime rate.
Nurture may be as important as nature. In 1910 the British started an annual Boys’ and Girls’ Championships, now known as Champs, which remains the biggest single annual sports event on the island.
More than 2,000 compete over three days every Easter, largely in sprints, watched by crowds of more than 30,000.
Kayron Raynor, athletics writer on the Jamaican Observer, says kids are as likely to race on scrubland as play cricket. Premier League football and NBA are the main attractions on television but sprinting is what comes naturally when they get off their backsides.
But of course that talent has to be kept in Jamaican colors to reap rewards:
It was widely and correctly reported that Bolt’s 100-meter victory was Jamaica’s first gold medal in that event. But other Jamaicans have crossed the line first, wearing other colors: Ben Johnson in 1988 (Canada, and he was later stripped of his gold), Linford Christie in 1992 (Great Britain) and Donovan Bailey in 1996 (Canada). If all of these men had worn green, black and yellow, Bolt’s gold would be perceived as only the latest — albeit the fastest — in a long line.
and also kept away from the grueling NCAA track schedule:
For many years, U.S. college coaches have aggressively recruited the Caribbean, including Jamaica. Quarrie went to USC, Ottey to Nebraska, 200 gold medalist Campbell-Brown to Arkansas and Beijing 100-meter co-silver medalist Stewart to Auburn. There are many others. But in recent years, more Jamaican athletes have chosen to stay home.
Again, when SI visited in May and watched a practice by the Kingston-based MVP track club, those on the track at 6 a.m. included Powell, Beijing 100-meter co-silver medalist Sherone Simpson, Shelly-Ann Fraser and Beijing 400 hurdles gold medalist Melanie Walker. Even U.S. coaches have realized that the demanding U.S. college schedule grinds up athletes and does not necessarily lead to gold medals. Hence many U.S. athletes (Allyson Felix, Alan Webb, Clement) are training outside the college system. By staying home and both training and attending college on the island, Jamaican athletes can focus on winning international medals.
Of course, some suspect a more nefarious reason than a fast track and starch-rich yams. Jamaica’s Observer thinks that pointing to the cheats of other countries is how they can convince the doubting Thomases:
For our part, this newspaper, like most Jamaicans, believes that our athletes’ performances in Beijing reflect the levelling of the playing field. We genuinely believe that the relative success in the fight against drug cheats over recent years has made it easier for athletes from countries like Jamaica to compete and win.
Even while we accept that our squad in Beijing is perhaps the most talented and probably the best prepared to leave these shores for an Olympic Games, we fervently believe that there would have been many more Gold medals down the years, had the playing field been as level as it is today.
Jamaica’s head drug tester also points to slavery as a reason:
Herb Elliott, who oversees drug testing in Jamaica and serves as the Olympic team’s head doctor, said African slaves who ended up in Jamaica were among the strongest and most determined – qualities, he says, that have helped the likes of Usain Bolt, the 22-year-old Jamaican track star.
… or is it more a cultural phenomena?
Todd Boyd, a professor at the University of Southern California who specializes in the study of race and popular culture, said he always has been leery of claims about physical or biological superiority of any one group. But he said the argument is more plausible when one considers that culture such as the one Elliott cites is learned as opposed to being genetically passed down.“At the end of the day, though, there is a culture of track that the Jamaicans have now mastered at a very high level,” Boyd wrote in an email.
Bolt grew up playing cricket and turned his attention to track when he realized he was the fastest boy in his grade school in rural Jamaica. His personal story supports the views of Diana Thorburn, a professor at the University of the West Indies, who cited the dearth of athletic options in Jamaica.
“If Usain Bolt were born in North America or Europe, he would be now earning far more money as a professional basketball player with the odds of a much longer and more lucrative career,” she wrote in an email.
Perhaps the convergence of training at home, not having other sporting options, and less competition from drug cheats created the perfect storm for Beijing:
“We feel because other people are now caught, the playing field is now more level for us,” Elliott said.Peppered by questions about Jamaican’s drug testing program, Elliott responded with a litany of assertions: the Jamaicans have spent about $930,000 on a government-sponsored drug testing program; he personally tested every Jamaican athlete that competed in the country’s Olympic trials; and sanctions against Julien Dunkley, a 32-year-old Jamaican sprinter, indicates the country is serious about drug testing. Dunkley was removed from the team in July for what Elliott said was a positive drug test.
He said Dunkley is among four athletes who have tested positive for drugs after Jamaican officials administered the tests.
“All of them trained in the States, and we caught them down in Kingston,” Elliott said. “So that is the end of that.”
…
“We know that our athletes have trained hard, that the country would not tolerate any kind of cheating because we are a moral, Christian country.”
Kerron Stewart, who won a silver medal when the Jamaicans swept the women’s 200, paused when asked whether increased drug testing has leveled the playing field during an Olympic competition in which no American won a gold medal in the marquee sprint races.
“What do you think?” she said, eyes widening. “What do you think?”
- Spoilsport Games chief Rogge under fire for swipe at Bolt the showman http://tinyurl.com/5hs6xu #
- Wham, bam thank you yam! What’s the secret of Jamaica’s sprinting success? http://tinyurl.com/5hbpdf “it is the yellow yams they eat.” #
- Can Jamaica’s Sprinters Fight Crime? - TIME http://tinyurl.com/67qm9g they “can speak to the young people in our more troubled communities” #
- Layden and Epstein: Why the Jamaicans are running away with sprint golds?in Beijing - 2008 Olympics - SI.com http://tinyurl.com/6grrnj #
- AFP: Jamaica seal Olympic sprint Grand Slam http://tinyurl.com/64zjfo #
- Gold Country http://tinyurl.com/6jo43u “the first time one country swept all four races at an Olympics since the US did it in 1988.” #
- YouTube - Michael Johnson reaction to Usain Bolt’s run http://tinyurl.com/6mj8up #
- Rogge rips the wrong guy http://tinyurl.com/675drk “one of the most ill-timed and gutless acts in the modern history of the Olympics.” #
- Jamaicans give athletics the fun factor http://tinyurl.com/62v4jg “… will be one of the most remembered aspects of the Beijing Olympics” #
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