On August 3, when the 100m sprint final—one of the most anticipated events in any major multi-sport event—takes place, the brightest star in the night will be Elaine Thompson-Herah, one of the trio of Jamaican women sprinters who have kept the small Caribbean nation’s extraordinary legacy of sprinting alive and kicking. The other two—“pocket rocket” aka “mommy rocket” Shelly-Ann Fraser-Pryce and Shericka Jackson—opted out after their incredible feats last month at the Athletics World Championship in the US.
If Jamaica has failed to produce a truly competitive male sprinter since the astounding days of Usain Bolt, the women have taken on the mantle, and how. It began firmly in the Bolt era, when Fraser-Pryce led a Jamaican 1-2-3 in the 100m sprint at the Beijing Olympics, the first 100m gold by a Caribbean woman. What’s even more amazing is that she led a Jamaican 1-2-3 in the 100m fourteen years later, at the 2022 Athletics World Championships, and this time with even better timing, for an unprecedented fifth world title!
“It’s truly unbelievable,” Usain Bolt told the Jamaica Observer, “especially considering that Shelly-Ann and I started our careers together.”
Between those two events, consider the supremacy of Jamaica’s women sprinters: Fraser-Pryce became only the third woman in history to defend her 100m title at the 2012 Olympics (fellow Jamaican Veronica Campbell-Brown won bronze). Thompson-Herah stepped up to the podium at the 2016 Olympics, with Fraser-Pryce winning bronze. Then Thompson-Herah emulated Fraser-Pryce and defended her title at the Tokyo Olympics where there was another Jamaican clean sweep (Fraser-Pryce won silver, Shericka Jackson won bronze). Not to mention the deluge of 2oom and 4x100 medals at the Olympics (Thompson-Herah won the 200m in 2016 and 2020, Jamaica won the 4X100 in 2020, with silver in 2016 and 2012) and the world championships.
The trio repeated their Tokyo feat, in a different order, less than a year later at the world championships.
“I knew we were going to be one, two, three,” Thompson-Herah told reporters after the race. “I didn’t know the order.”
How is it that a tiny, economically backward island nation, with barely any infrastructure for track and field (there are only two world-class tracks in all of Jamaica) dominates the world in sprinting, an event that just about every country in the world participates in and where countries like the US spend millions of dollars on training, infrastructure and research?
It’s a question that has obsessed coaches, sports scientists and the athletics world ever since the rise of Bolt.
One answer that the Jamaicans are themselves fond of is diet—ackee and salt fish (Jamaica’s national dish; ackee is a fruit that’s eaten like a vegetable, introduced from West Africa to the Caribbean), yams and green bananas, chicken. Science does not support this claim. While sprinters need high-carb, high-protein diets, there is nothing specific about ackee, yams, or green bananas that gives them an edge over, say, sweet potatoes. And anyway, all of these are common produce, available widely around the world, so nothing stops a sprinter in, say, India, from adopting that diet as a route to success.
The second reason is a fractious, divisive one that gets subsumed by the ugly world of racial politics, though the science behind it is both undeniable and fascinating: genes. For decades now, the top sprinters in the world can all be traced back to a small gene pool from the west coast of Africa (just like the top distance runners in the world come from a small gene pool from the Rift Valley region in East Africa), and this holds true for the Caribbean sprinters.
There are a few things that set people with these genes apart: on an average, they have longer limbs and shorter trunks than European or Asian people, as well as slimmer pelvic bones, which, research has shown, has a direct impact on their ability to lift their knees high when running, an essential component of sprinting. An even more fascinating line of research has been on a disease called sickle cell anemia or its non-disease cousin, sickle-cell trait, which is caused by a gene mutation that leads to haemoglobin cells becoming sickle-shaped, which, in turn, leads to more fast-twitch muscle fibers that are essential for short burst activities like sprinting. Research has shown a significant prevalence of sickle-cell trait in people of west African origin, possibly as a response to high incidence of malaria in the region (sickle-cell offers protection from malaria).
While it’s compelling and interesting, the genetic trait still does not fully explain Jamaica’s dominance—why is it that western African nations don’t dominate sprinting? Or Brazilians, where there is a much larger pool of people with west African genes compared to Jamaica?
That brings us to the third factor: the culture of sprints in Jamaica. Sprinting is the dominant sport in Jamaica, above football or cricket. Indeed the sport is more popular here than in other country in the world. One of the most anticipated and well-attended events in Jamaica—to the point of hysteria—is “Champs", or the “Inter-Secondary Schools Sports Association Boys and Girls Athletics Championship”. Jamaicans routinely overrun track events, the way Indians do at T20 matches, or Europeans at football. Which means that the most athletically gifted people on the island not only get spotted, but also have a clear aspiration—to be a sprinter, unlike say, in India, where you would get pulled into cricket, or Europe, where football is much more aspirational than track, or the US, where you would be scouted for the far more lucrative American football.
For Thompson-Herah, none of that will matter of course when she lines up for her attempt at a CWG gold. What will matter more is that she is so close to one of the oldest standing records in athletics. Florence Griffith-Joyner set the current 100m world record—10.50s—in 1988 (allegations of doping continue to cloud her records, without proof though). Since then, the men’s 100m record has been broken 12 times. In Tokyo, Thompson-Herah clocked 10.57, the second fastest ever, breaking Griffith-Joyner’s 33-year-old Olympic record, and coming within a whisker of the world mark. In the 200m too, Shericka Jackson recorded the fastest ever time behind Griffith-Joyner’s world record, also set in 1988, at the world championships last month, while the third fastest time belongs to Thompson-Herah, for her gold-medal winning run in Tokyo.
For us spectators too, none of the causes should matter. Instead, we have the privilege of watching the golden generation of Jamaica’s women sprinters attempting to break a record that has steadfastly stood like a rock over decades.
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