By KWAME WILLIAMS
Trinidad Guardian
Retired T&T sprinter Ato Boldon has said that once the members of this nation’s men’s 4x100 metres relay team stay injury-free, they are almost sure to win medals at the August 6-14 World Athletics Championships in Helsinki, Finland.
At the Helsinki Grand Prix on Monday, the T&T quartet comprising Central American and Caribbean Senior Championships 100m gold medallist Darrel Brown, national 100m champion Marc Burns, 2003 national sprint double champion Jacey Harper, and national 200m title winner Aaron Armstrong, won the meet’s relay event in 38.38 seconds—a new T&T record and the best time for the event in the world this year.
It was the second time for the year that the T&T sprinters improved the national record and clocked a world-leading time. The first was at the CAC Championships in Nassau earlier this month when they retained the men’s sprint relay crown in 38.47 secs.
Boldon, a quadruple Olympic Games sprint medallist, said yesterday that even before the team’s performance on Monday, he felt the youths would easily be among the medals at the “Worlds.”
“The relay team is doing very well and I think they are already medal contenders—even if they didn’t improve one more hundredth of a second before the games,” Boldon said.
T&T’s best sprint relay result at the biennial World Championships came in 2001 in Edmonton, Canada. There, a Boldon-Brown-Burns-Harper combination won the bronze medals in 38.58 seconds. They failed to place among the top three teams at the 2003 edition of the meet, bowing out of the competition at the semi-final stage. This time around, Boldon believes the team is in an excellent position to better the third-place finish of 2001.
“I watched the latest national record race and they are passing the stick as well as anyone else, which, apart from an incident or two in the last four years, is the trademark of the T&T team. Now they also have healthy personnel,” he said. “When this team won bronze at Worlds in 2001, I thought we would be a sub-38 team in another year or two. But injuries to several members hampered that, so we under-achieved. “Now, they are healthy and running as a team. This may well be the year,” Boldon said.
He even applauded the National Amateur Athletics Association—with whom he was embroiled in a conflict after he questioned the legitimacy of the times clocked in the men’s 100m final at last month’s Sagicor Open Championships—for its handling of the team.
“The other reason why this team is running so well is because they are running together pre-championships, which is something that was rarely done before, so the NAAA is to be commended for that.”
