Organisers of the many of the development track meets being held inside the Corporate Area this season are being confronted with the challenge of finding an appropriate venue to host their events.

The situation is that the track at the Stadium East and the one inside the National Stadium are being repaired as they have become badly worn from ‘overuse’.

Jamaica is a track and field nation. We have a flood of meets at the start of each outdoor season and we have the largest high school track meet in the world.

This year we have come to realise that the tracks have become worn; the two at the stadium complex and the other at the GC Foster College.

This weekend the Queens/Grace Jackson meet will be held under trying circumstances because the national stadium will be shared with a Jehovah Witness Convention that had been booked for the weekend.

Why did it come to this? Why did we not have an alternative venue, a suitable alternative venue to host a meet where most of our senior athletes, the very best in the world, will start their seasons?

The leaders of government and the sport, in my opinion, still see sport a only recreation and not a business. With the success of our athletes this country has leverage to accomplish many things.

Each year more and more international athletes are seeking to visit Jamaica to train even as winter maintains its strangehold in their respective homelands.

For these countries the cost to lay a running track is relatively miniscule and is something we could have negotiated years ago had we the foresight. We need to start seeing sport as business and not only as recreation. Should we start doing that we can use the leverage that our athletes have given us to have better facilities for our athletes to train, better facilities which we can use to develop our young athletes, and better facilities which we can use as lure to attract athletes from overseas as well as their families to come here to spend their winters training and living in tropical sunshine.
What have now are broken down palaces, that limit our opportunities for growth in the respective sports and are nothing short of a national disgrace.

I dont  know why, but some people in this country forget that the name of the sport in Track and Field, not Track and definitely not Sprints.
But that is the way we behave; as if the sprints are the other thing that matters. But the people who do the field events deserve the attention too.
Dorian Scott, a 20-metre shot putter, who missed the Olympics through injury, is perhaps Jamaica’s best thrower ever, but he is treated like an outcast. Travis Smikle last year became the first Jamaican thrower in more than 80 years to win a medal in global competition, when he secured a bronze medal at the World Youth Championships in Italy yet you never see hardly see his name in the papers like you would a Dexter Lee.
Jamaica currently sits on a gold mine of potential world-beating throwers and all they need is a little attention and support.
Yet, as journalists all we want to do is focus on the stars and not those who could become stars. We have become such fans of our sprinters we forget that there are other disciplines within the sport.
The administrators also have short-changed the throwers and field events people. Smikle, for example, sources said, was almost left off that team to Italy last year. If he had been, Jamaica would have come home with one medal instead of two, 50 per cent of our medal count.
Isn’t it time then for us to recognise that throwers should get some pride of place.
Last weekend I watched a talented bunch of young men throw at the Big Shot Invitational at the St Hugh’s High School and seen that there is a lot of talent just waiting to be developed into world beaters, but somehow you get the feeling that those who really should care really don’t.
But it has to change.
It would be an injustice of monumental proportions if kids like Ashinia Miller, Randale Watson, Chad Wright, Smikle, Canniga Raynor, Oshane Harris, and girls like Candicea Bernard and Vanessa Levy, are not given the opportunity to be the best they can be.
Like the sprinters they want to represent and make Jamaica proud so why are they being afforded the opportunity to do so on a level playing field?
Sport should not always be only about the glamour, it should more oftentimes be about the substance as well.

There has been much debate since the selection of Brigette Foster Hylton as Female Athlete of the Year; was she the right choice? I say she was.
For the first time in our long and storied history on Track and Field Jamaica had three world champions to choose from and those choices could not have been easy.
Shelly Ann Fraser, the Beijing Olympic 100 metre champion did even better in Berlin. In Beijing the pint-sized sprinter clocked 10.78, the fastest time in the world to win that title. In Berlin, she was even faster, taking the world title in 10.73, eclipsing Ottey’s national record of 10.74.

 Fraser was also a member of the gold-medal winning 4×100 metres relay team.

Melaine Walker could also have easily been the choice too. After setting a new Olympic record in winning gold in Beijing, she came to Berlin in even better form, winning over the favoured Lashinda Demus in 52.42s, the second fastest time in history.
Foster Hylton, however, did something that neither Fraser nor Walker, managed last season. She became the first, the very first sprint hurdler in Jamaica’s history to win a gold medal at a global event.
She also did it after returning from retirement. The attractive wife of Patrick Hylton, the CEO of the National Commercial Bank, having stepped away out of the frustration of failing to win a medal in Beijing, was perhaps looking at finally starting a family, but was convinced to return by her coach Stephen Francis. And even when she did return, coaxed into giving it one last shot, she did not look as convincing leading up to the world championships.
Yes, she was in the thick of things in most of the races she ran leading up to the world championships, but going into Berlin, Foster Hylton was not even considered a medal contender.
The American Dawn Harper, who surprised the world by winning gold in Beijing, was favoured to win again and based on what she did in the semi-finals, it seemed that she would once again relegate Foster Hylton to the minor placings; sending the Jamaican back into retirement well short of her career goals.
We all saw what happened next.

Brigette did not lose a race after Berlin, seven straight wins, including the World Athletics Finals, dipping below 12.50 seconds a few times in the process.
Fraser lost several times to American Carmelita Jeter and looked a tired athlete as the season wound down. Foster who is older by a decade, looked refreshed and rejuvenated, confident that she was the best sprint hurdler in the world, and that’s why she deserved to be the female athlete of the year.

Justin Gatlin shared the 100 metre world record for a very short time with Asafa Powell before he was banned in 2006 for testing positive for elevated levels of testosterone. He makes a return to the track just over six months from now and already he has started to talk about challenging world record holder Usain Bolt, Asafa Powell and his countryman Tyson Gay on the track.

Gatlin has obviously been away too long because there are several things that he has obviously not yet taken into consideration.

When Gatlin clocked 9.77 in Doha, it made him the joint fastest man in the world at that time. Since then Powell, his main nemesis then, lowered his personal best to 9.74 (the world record that Usain Bolt broke) and eventually to 9.72s.
Bolt came along in May 2008 and amazed the world with a 9.76s clocking in Jamaica and then 9.72 in New York later that same month.

Bolt would smash that record in Beijing and smash it again in Berlin this past August. As of August 2009, Bolt is officially .19 seconds faster than Gatlin has ever run, even faster .27 if you consider Gatlin’s best legal time of 9.85s since his 9.77 record has been stripped.

Powell and Gay, too, are .13 and .14 faster as well. If Gatlin and Bolt should race at their best, then Gatlin would be about the distance Powell finished behind Bolt in Berlin, a city block and a half.

But will it even come to that? Gatlin is not even certain to get a chance to race against the world’s best sprinters. Like Englishman Dwayne Chambers, Gatlin may be overlooked as the Diamond League gets underway this season. Meet organisers, especially those in Europe, are not inclined to invite Gatlin because they do not want the press about the meet to be about the drug-tainted American. In a time of recession, who needs the negative publicity?

As it turns out Gatlin may only get to race against Bolt et al in South Korea in 2011 and again in 2012, and that is if he makes the top three in the sprints in his own country.

Gatlin has not raced competitively in more than three years and at a US trials he would be up against a healthy Tyson Gay, a healthy and focussed Walter Dix, Mike Rodgers, and perhaps a few new threats to Tyson Gay’s crown.
Life is not going to be easy for Justin Gatlin when he returns. I would suggest that he learns to creep once more before he starts thinking about running with lightning.