Grant Shimmin athletics
It’s calypso time, and no, I’m not talking about the cricket in the West Indies. The second meeting of the Engen Grand Prix Summer Series, tonight at Pretoria’s Pilditch stadium, will feature the Caribbean’s track and field equivalent of Brian Lara and Courtney Walsh.
Sure, one of them prefers football to cricket and the other is a woman, but in their respective island nations, they are the closest thing track and field has to heroes in the West Indies.
Ato Boldon was the only member of Trinidad and Tobago’s trio of international sports stars not to be at the Queen’s Park Oval in Port of Spain this week. Dwight Yorke was watching and Lara was out there, but the multiple Olympic medallist was well aware of the goings-on back home when he jetted into Johannesburg.
One of the sport’s great showmen, although the title of biggest exhibitionists must go to his mate Maurice Greene and the other members of the American 4x100m team that won gold in Sydney, Boldon is sure to be a crowd-pleaser.
He’s set his sights on the gap in his world championship CV, the 100m gold, at this year’s championships in Edmonton, Canada, in August, and his 100m appearance tonight, followed by next week’s half-lapper at the Grand Prix Final at Stellenbosch, will be good pointers to his prospects, given that he hasn’t raced since winning bronze in the 200m final in Sydney.
As he stressed on arrival, however, what he and coach John Smith are most concerned about is that he feels good leaving South Africa, ready to go home and work towards the bigger challenges awaiting in the second half of the year.
Not that that means he won’t perform here. Last year’s star attraction, Michael Johnson, followed a very similar philosophy and he left South Africa with a world record, albeit in a rarely run event, and one of the fastest 200m times in history.
I felt a shade intimidated the other day when I realised Walsh had started his Test career when I was in matric, all of 17 years ago. Compared with Merlene Ottey, though, he’s a veritable spring chicken. She ran in her first Olympics, winning a bronze in the 4x100m relay, 21 years ago, and she still has no definite plans for retirement at nearly 41. Then again, why should she, if she’s still in the world’s top handful of sprinters, finishing fourth in the 100m in Sydney after a below-par preparation because she was fighting a positive test for the controversial steroid nandrolone (that was eventually set aside)?
Ottey, like Boldon, has never been able to win an individual Olympic gold though the latter still has time to set that right. But she is a woman who exudes class and dignity, despite her disappointments.
At the 1997 world championships in Athens, the focussed Jamaican was 70m down the track in the 100m final, before she realised there’d been a false start. Betraying no emotion, she turned and walked serenely back to the starting blocks, taking her time as she tried to recover some of her spent energy. Not surprisingly, she finished just out of the medals, but her response to a desperately disappointing situation had been class personified.
Like her fellow countryman, Walsh, she’s going to leave a big gap when she does retire.