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Jamaica’s sporting exports are fairly limited. The national men’s football team is ranked 59th in the world (with their women’s side 42nd), the national men’s cricket team last won the West Indies Championship back in 2012 and the Jamaican Olympic Association (JOA) will send athletes in just four sports to the 2024 Olympics.
The Caribbean nation, though, has something of a love affair with sprinting. Of the 88 Olympic medals ever brought back to the JOA headquarters in Kingston, 87 have been for athletics, with David Weller’s cycling bronze in the men’s 1km time trial at Moscow 1980 the lone exception.
It necessarily follows that of the 58 Jamaican athletes making the near-8,000km pilgrimage from the Caribbean to Europe, 54 are competing in athletics, including a maximum contingent in the 100m, 200m, 400m, 100m hurdles, 110m hurdles, 400m hurdles and 4x100m and 4x400m relays. Among them is Jamaica’s latest athletics prodigy: Kishane Thompson.
Born in 2001, Thompson will make his Olympic debut in Paris and has one startlingly low number on his resume. At the Jamaican Olympic trials in June, Thompson recorded a 100m sprint time of just 9.77s, recognised by World Athletics as the ninth-fastest effort of all time, ‘just’ 0.19s slower than Usain Bolt’s elusive world record which until recently was considered to be unbreakable. Bolt’s seat in the pantheon of Olympic greats could soon be upset.
To add to the spectacle of that result, Thompson claims that he only ran the first 60m of the race before easing off, saying “the goal wasn’t to prove anything tonight, just to run a 70 or 60 and see where I am at.” If that is the truth, Bolt’s record could be in danger. That strategy was reportedly the decision of Stephen ‘Franno’ Francis, who has coached a swathe of Jamaican sprinters to gold medals, including Shelly-Ann Fraser-Price and Michael Frater.
Growing up in rural Jamaica, Thompson was coached during his school career by a litany of Jamaican athletics legends and was tipped for a successful career from the start despite suffering hamstring injuries and missing out on years of competition due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Even with those limiting factors hampering his formative years, he dominated domestic schoolboy championships, winning in a variety of disciplines throughout his high school years, before finally catching the eye of the wider athletics world at 2023’s Jamaican Championships, recording a time of 9.91s in the first heat of the tournament, the 61st-fastest effort in history.
A fourth-place finish at the 2023 Prefontaine Classic, where he was pipped to the podium places by the Team USA duo of Christian Coleman and Noah Lyles, confirmed his deserved spot in the upper echelons of athletics.
Now approaching world record pace, he is eyeing up the top step of the Olympic podium and the bookies say he has every right to, favouring the Jamaican over Lyles, the reigning world champion.
The margins separating Thompson and Lyles are nominal, though. Thomson leads the American by just four-hundreths of a second in raw timings. Adjust the times for wind, though, and Lyles takes the lead by two-hundreths.
Away from the track, Thompson is known as a family man, noted for his intelligence and humility. He is particularly close with his mother and twin brother, Kishaun. Despite that humility, though, he is brimming with confidence ahead of his Olympic debut.
“I was never short on confidence, but I believe I have much more to do as I can run way faster,” he said in a massive statement of intent after claiming his maiden Jamaican title.
Perhaps the best compliment Thompson has received came from Lyles, the man set to become his biggest rival, who does not seem to relish the prospect of racing him. Lyles shied away from the fixture, saying “I hope he stays injured.”
The preliminary round of the 100m at the Paris Olympics will take place on 3 August, with the remaining rounds and final set to be held the following day.
