Rio 2016: Inside Jamaica’s sprint factory where Usain Bolt perfected his style on a grass track

Pulling power: Usain Bolt features on UTech’s wall of fame, where students mostly still train on a grass track
(Michael Steele/Getty Images)
Jonathan Hunn4 August 2016

On entering the gates of the University of Technology in the Jamaican capital, it is pretty hard to miss the giant, hand-painted billboard that spans the first building you pass, celebrating the college’s most famous recent alumni.

Bedecked in the famous green, gold and black of their country of birth, their names trip off the tongue as easily as they have for commentators around the globe over the past few years: Shelly-Ann Fraser-Pryce, Brigitte Foster-Hylton, Nesta Carter, Asafa Powell and, unusually last but not least, Usain Bolt, the phenomenon aiming to add another three Olympic golds to his haul of six in Rio.

This colourful welcome sign leaves one in no doubt that the beautifully-manicured campus is the home of the reggae island’s world-renowned sprint factory and that these names, among many others going back four decades, provide great pride and inspiration for those starting out on the road of following in some extremely fast footsteps.

So what looms into view next comes as a bit of a shock; it’s a field, a simple grass field. Look carefully and the outline of a 400metre athletics track can just about be made out, along with long iron bars, about five metres in length and more easily at home on a farm than a track for elite runners, slung across the lanes at hurdle height.

“The facilities are what we have and we have to work with what we have,” says UTech’s director of sport Anthony Davis from his office above the college’s indoor training facilities, complete with a slippery linoleum-type floor but no air conditioning, two aircraft hangar-style doors at each end of the hall providing some relief amid the muggy Caribbean air. “The bulk of our training is on the grass track, which helps prevent injuries. It helps create strong ankles and with the high knee action we promote.”

That high knee action: picture Bolt’s high-step, ground-munching style and it is clear how effective UTech’s ­programme is.

“We then start using the all-weather track for race readiness,” adds Davis. “Provided the students have a willingness, a passion, desire, the basic frame, then we can turn you into a sprinter.”

Davis should know. The 64-year-old had no track experience when he was hand-picked as a 20-year-old by Dennis Johnson when the former Olympian and a man who equalled the world 100 yards record three times over a six-week period in 1961 returned home from San Jose State University in the United States in 1971.

Johnson's dream on leaving college, inspired by his San Jose sprint coach Bud Winter, was to take what he had learned in California and develop a US-style college athletic programme in Jamaica.

“Jamaica exploded onto the international scene when we started training athletes at home… and UTech were the pioneers in this development,” adds Davis. “Dennis said at the outset that we could develop stars, turn our athletes into world record holders. His belief was that you could teach someone to sprint in the same way that you could teach someone to become a lawyer or an engineer.

“Before this programme started we used to see good students going to the United States [as Johnson had done], but the fallout from that was they were tired from performing in the collegiate season over there and then underperforming at international level.

“It was Bud Winter who identified running relaxed – high knees, high head… ‘mechanical runners’ some joked – and he also believed it was easier to teach someone with no running background. He looked at people he thought had potential but who hadn’t necessarily showed it at an early stage.”

Success did not come overnight, but the programme’s initial breakthrough came at the 1975 Pan-American Games in Mexico City, where Jamaica won one silver and three bronze medals on the track following some lean years after initial success in the 1940s.

Since then, Jamaica has provided some of the biggest names in the sport and it regularly punches above its weight, belying its population of just 2.7m.

It helps that sprinting appears to be in the blood of young Jamaicans. While last month’s national championships and Olympic trials drew crowds over four days and nights of action varying from a few hundred to a few thousand to Kingston’s National Stadium, built to host the 1966 Commonwealth Games, the annual high school championships demonstrate the island’s love of track running.

“The high school championships in Jamaica are like something you’ll never see elsewhere, attracting crowds of 30,000 people,” says Davis. “So in some ways it’s the high school system that drives the sport here, but we only started to dominate on the world stage once we’d got the collegiate system right.”

To help ensure they keep their best young talent at home, Johnson and UTech quickly realised that they had to foster partnerships and ventured into business with world-renowned coach Stephen Francis and the MVP Track and Field Club in Kingston.

“We had to work out how to keep students at home, which we achieve via a scholarships route,” says Davis. “Then we created a model whereby student athletes come to UTech already aligned to a club. For instance, Stephen Francis is employed by the college but then earns his money from running the MVP team from the college premises.”

Of course, talk track and field and the shadow of drugs is never far away.

Recent revelations that Carter, part of the same 4x100m relay team as Bolt at five major championships and one of those adorning the wall at UTech, tested positive for a banned stimulant at the Beijing Games brings an angry response from Davis.

Rio 2016 Olympic Games Venues - In pictures

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“That was very shocking. We’re confused because in 2008, [methylhexanamine] was not on the banned list. The test was available in 2008 but it wasn’t used… now they use it and his name is the only one that has been revealed. We don’t believe he has done anything wrong and we’re supporting him all the way.”

That does not mean, of course, that Davis is tolerant of any wrongdoing in respect to doping.

“We do not condone drug-taking of any sort,” he says. “We have to appeal to our students to bring in any medication or supplements they might be thinking of taking to get it checked out here, but we are also lucky in that we have a pharmacy on campus where the athletes are encouraged to get any medicine they may need.

“There is no system in place in the college for drug testing but at the same time I do not believe that, compared to other countries, we have a large problem.”

As the minibus that brought our party here heads for the gates, I gaze back at that billboard mural. Following the Rio Games, the artists at UTech will most likely be adding Elaine Thompson to that gallery of faces and, further down the line, Chris Taylor, a 16-year-old schoolboy who narrowly missed out on Olympic qualification this time.

There’s just about enough room either side to extend it for those two, but one gets the feeling there will be plenty more coming off the Jamaican production line soon. They can worry about that one when the time comes.

For more information on the Reggae Island, go to visitjamaica.com

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