2023 BLAZING IN BUDAPEST
12.90 seconds.
He’s right. Broadbell was part of a winning Penn Relay 4x100 team at St. Jago High School and Tapper anchored Jamaica to a medal at last year’s NACAC Championships in Freeport, Bahamas. Nugent and Williams are accomplished sprinters and Benne did 4x100 duty for Calabar and the Jamaica Under‐ 20 team as required.
For her part, Megan Tapper has never been faster. She clocked 12.61 when she reached the 2019 World final, 12.53 to start her journey to the 2021 Olympic final – where she won Jamaica’s first‐ever medal in the 100‐metre hurdles – and 12.51 last year. She describes herself as “a five‐ foot lady with 7‐foot dreams” and hailed her third naonal tle victory as a product of “Hope+Faith+Work+Paence”. A week later in Silesia, Poland, Tapper confirmed her form with a me of 12.49 seconds in a race won by Nigeria’s world champion and world record holder Tobi Amusan, whose coach is Jamaican hurdles great Lacena Golding‐Clarke. Our preeminence in the hurdles didn’t start as fast as Tapper does. Between the isolated brilliance of 1960 Olympic finalist Keith Gardner and the fourth‐place finish of Sandra Farmer in the 1987 World Championship 400‐metre hurdles final, the island was home to sprinters and lile else. Parchment’s coach Fitz Coleman helped to usher the change along. He was around when development meets didn’t include hurdles. “I remember when Herb McKenley was president of the JAAA and I was working at Calabar, teaching there, coaching there. Back then, development meets were primarily held at the Stadium, and you noced that there was never hurdles, and I went to Herb and I said, hey, you know, there’s no hurdle event. You’re the president and we have
“We have tapped into a gold mine,” Coleman underscored.
He credits his fellow coaches and the GC Foster College for Physical Educaon and Sport. “Thank God for GC Foster and others. We have now seen where others have come into the sport and realized this is an area that we can move into, just like how we have seen field events picking up. You just need one person, just one person to shi the bar and then you’re going to find two, three, four, and there’s a chain reacon,” he theorized. In the women’s sprint hurdles, Freeman, Gillian Russell‐Love and the late Dionne Rose were the pioneers, with Brigie Foster‐Hylton, Golding‐Clarke and Delloreen Ennis connuing soon aer. In fact, Freeman, Russell‐Love, Golding‐Clarke and Foster‐Hylton gave Jamaica the Commonwealth tle in 1994, 1998, 2002 and 2006, respecvely. Through Maurice Wignall, Andrew Riley, Ronald Levy and Broadbell, Jamaica has won the Commonwealth men’s tle in 2006, 2014, 2018 and 2022. In the 400 hurdles, thanks to Kaliese Spencer in 2014 and Janieve Russell in both 2018
hurdlers. Why can’t we put it in?”, Coleman remembers. Jamaica’s 2022 Commonwealth Games champion Rasheed Broadbell clocked 12.94 seconds to win the national sprint hurdle title. He knows what it feels like to beat the two-time world champion, Grant Holloway (USA). The complaint pointed to logisc difficules in staging hurdles races. “I said to him, don’t worry. We can run the 400 hurdles and start off, and he was saying it’s going to be difficult, and I remember I went to the Stadium about 6.30 in the morning, God and I, and I got the trolley, and I walked around the Stadium and put the hurdles up. That’s how we started running the 400 hurdles as the first event,” the veteran coach shared. Coleman knows why Jamaica is so strong in the sprint hurdles. “We are now slowly driing away from taking the fourth string and so forth to do the hurdles. We’re geng persons who can be a part of their instuon’s sprint relay or even the 4x400,” he outlined.
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