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| T&T’s Renny Quow, second right, receives the baton from Deon Lendore during the men’s 4x800m relay final event at the Central American and Caribbean Athletics Championship in Mayaguez, Puerto Rico, last July. AP Photo |
The road to the London Olympics passes through New York at Icahn Stadium, on Saturday. Each athlete’s pathway is dissimilar. However the resources to make the journey more developmental are there. This includes this important pit stop in New York where the Adidas Grand Prix showcases the journey with world-class athletes as they make their way through the biggest and brightest city in the world, heading towards the Olympic Games. No matter what happens from now until the end, the world will bear witness. This second decade will see the fastest or even the greatest quarter-milers ever since the likes of Michael Johnson appeared on the planet. T&T has a new generation of green quarter-milers which include Lendore, Hewitt, Forte, Lalonde, Solomon, Mitchell, Richards, Cedenio, Quow. These rivals hopefully will be assembled to do battle at the T&T championships at the end of this month. Six will rise and make the hunting pack. They will all seek to be the Alpha quartermiler of this generation’s litter to challenge and dethrone the reigning king and claim the crown as new champion. The Alpha will lead his pack of young cubs against the best in the world.
To win a medal they must run under three minutes. Currently the team is ranked 13th on the list. The limit is 16 teams. The former Olympian and 400 metres record holder, Ian Morris wrote about this earlier in April. The game is on. They are young, untried, inexperience, nervous, the adrenaline is flowing. Their blood must travel through ice cold veins to achieve their purpose. Their assignment is to put the country on the map charted by their predecessors. A noble bunch of boys grew up to be men in Tokyo 1964.They put together silver and gold to the reality of a World record in the 4 x 400 relay in Jamaica 1966. There is no pressure on this young pack. They should just go out there and run to their potential. This is their freshman year. Their destiny should be fulfilled in 2013. It will be historic. And the world is on notice of the coming impact of this nation on track & field. The man from the East, Deon Lendore, will lead the charge. He is from the club Abilene. Abilene: (land of meadows)—a city situated on the eastern slope of Antilibanus, in a district fertilized by the river Barada (Abana). The city was 18 miles from Damascus, and stood in a remarkable gorge called Suk Wady Barada. Arima is 18 miles from East of Port-of-Spain. It is in the lowland valley of the Northern Range. It is fertilised by the “ice factory river”—running north to south to the mighty Caroni.
What a season it will be for Lendore if it turns out that my optimism is converted into results. While the nation waits, sprint sensations Kelly-Ann Baptiste, Shelly-Ann Fraser-Pryce, Carmelita Jeter, and Yohan Blake will run in the Grand Prix in New York, one of the premier track-and-field events in the world. It is the sixth stop on the international Samsung Diamond League circuit, and the third stop on the Visa Championship Series. Randall’s Island in New York City—that’s where the action will be. The London Olympic Stadium will be officially opened this weekend in the presence of IAAF President Lamine Diack and 40,000 spectators, one of whom will be plucked from the crowd on Saturday evening to perform the formal opening rites.
The ceremony – including 'top secret’ celebrity entertainme—will be held in the midst of the London Games’ athletics test event which takes place from Friday to Monday marking the first competitive action on the track where Bolt, Blake, and others. will strut their stuff just 12 weeks—or 2012 hours—later. Those with some prospect of making the T&T team include: Ahye, Alexander, Selvon, Lucas, Hackett, Wilson, Jehue, Burns, Brown and Callendar, Thompson, Sorillo and Murrain. For them, this test event is a chance to sample the particular geography, feel and atmosphere of an arena where they hope to live their Olympic dreams in the near future, an opportunity no 'international’ athlete will have before teams arrive in July for the Games themselves. That lies in the future, however. The London Olympic Stadium’s first small entry into athletics history will be written this weekend; the main chapter will follow shortly.
