Jamaicans at C’wealth down on gold-medal count

THANKS TO Fedrick Dacres, Ronald Levy, Janieve Russell, Aisha Praught-Leer, Danniel Thomas-Dood, Kimberly Williams and the women’s 4x400 team, Jamaica won seven gold medals at the 2018 Commonwealth Games on the Gold Coast in Australia.

With the athletics programme of the 2022 Games, beginning yesterday in Birmingham, England, the best hope of a title defence might well come in the triple jump.

A Jamaican win would bring the gold medal home for the fifth time in a row.

2005 World Champion Trecia Smith won the event in 2006 and 2010, with Williams continuing the streak in 2014 and 2018.

Jamaica’s top exponent now is Shanieka Ricketts, the 2019 and 2022 World Championships runner-up. The lanky Jamaican is more than 40 centimetres better than Dominica’s Olympic finalist, Thea Lafond, on the 2022 Commonwealth performance list, 14.89 metres to 14.56. But Lafond will remember she beat Ricketts in June at the Rabat Diamond League meeting.

She was fifth at the recent World Athletics Championships in Eugene, Oregon, ahead of seventh-placed Williams, who has struggled a little since she won the World Indoor bronze medal in March.

With discus ace Dacres fighting back from a midseason groin strain, and 110-metre hurdler Levy and steeplechaser Praught-Leer absent, Russell will seek to redeem her season after an early exit in the Eugene 400-metre hurdles. In Birmingham, she will hope to win her third consecutive medal in the event known as the ‘mankiller’ and to extend a streak started in 2014 by Kaliese Spencer.

A Jamaican sweep isn’t out of the question as Russell, Eugene finalist Rushell Clayton and two-time semi-finalist Shiann Salmon are the fastest women in the Commonwealth at 53.63 seconds for both Russell and Clayton and 53.82 for Salmon.

Thomas-Dodd will have her hands full. Canadian Sarah Mitton finished ahead of her at the World Championships and the margin on season’s best – 20.33 metres to 19.53 for the Jamaican – is sizable.

Traves Smikle, who was second in 2018, stands fourth on the Commonwealth Games performance list but the stout-hearted thrower could find his way back to the podium.

With World top eight finishers Stephenie McPherson, the 2014 winner, and Candice McLeod on duty, medals are a possibility in the women’s 400 and a defence of the 4x400 title is real.

Elaine Thompson Herah was in the middle of her ongoing Achilles tendon misery when she placed fourth in the 200 in 2018. If the double-double Olympic champion has rested from Eugene, she will be a threat in the sprints where her 2022 100-metre best of 10.79 seconds is the fastest of all entrants.

Jamaica garnered seven gold, eight silver and 10 bronze medals, its largest ever Commonwealth Games medal haul, but a repeat is not likely.