Time-Out with Paul Reid, Staff Reporter
WESTERN BUREAU:
AFTER ALL the hype and build-up, the inaugural Jamaica International Invitational track and field meet held at the National Stadium on Friday went off like a wet squib, despite the presence of some of the world's top athletes.
Just two years after the staging of what was by consensus the best ever International Amateur Athletics Federation (IAAF) World Junior Championships, this meet, which was supposed to be the return of top-class international competition to the island, fell flat in a number of areas.
In a country where track and field fans have become accustomed to world-class track meets, the organisation and running of this meet left a lot to be desired and it would take a lot more space than this column is allowed to list the foul-ups.
Up to the time of writing this column, four days after the meet, the organisers had not made any public statements, which can only serve to mean that they were satisfied with the product that was foisted on an unsuspecting public on Friday night.
NO DISPLAY BOARDS
It is amazing that the organisers could have attempted to stage an event of this magnitude without display boards to keep the packed grandstand aware of what was going on.
It is not the first time track fans have been subjected to this kind of treatment and we have been told on more than one occasions that the cost of hiring these equipment is exorbitant.
There are ways of dealing with this by using knowledgeable and qualified persons to keep the fans abreast of what is going on. Which brings me to another point, the dinosaurs that are used as meet announcers must go. The sooner the better. Meet after meet after meet we hear the same voices making the same sad mistakes. Be it champs or Gibson Relays, it is painfully obvious the announcers have no idea what they are watching and this can only mean one thing, the sport has passed them by.
UNFORGIVABLE
If announcing that World and Olympic 400m hurdles champion Felix Sanchez was from Dominica and not the Dominican Republic was not bad enough, announcing Michelle Ballentyne's 2:01 time on the 800m as a national record was unforgivable.
No, I am not perfect and yes, I do make mistakes but there can be no excuse for that kind of mistake.
Not even those who stayed home were spared the misery, as the television coverage was at best amateurish. Obviously, Rohan Daley is more comfortable talking about horses than human beings and kept asking the same questions over and over to all the different guests.
Thank God for Hubert Lawrence and Lance Whittaker, who called the races and guests such as Claude Bryan, K.C. Graham and others who actually had track and field information at hand.
WEIRD LIST
Then there was the curious list of local runners who were invited. Yes we understood that injury caused the absence of Usain Bolt, Lorraine Fenton, Gregory Haughton, Jermaine Myers and Michael Blackwood but there were others, yet what we saw were the invited athletes beating up on second and third rate local talent.
If Holmwood schoolgirl Sonita Sutherlands was invited to run the 400m then Edwin Allen's Kay-Ann Thompson should have been in the 800m field after running untested all season long with a best of under 2:04.00.
