Champs in limbo - JAAA boss Dr Warren Blake: Cancellation may be necessary as a response to the coronavirus
Published:Wednesday | March 11, 2020 | 12:00 AMDaniel Wheeler/Gleaner Writer
Jamaica Athletics Administrative Association (JAAA) president Dr Warren Blake says the cancellation of this year’s ISSA/GraceKennedy Boys and Girls’ Championships may be necessary as a response to the coronavirus which had its first confirmed case in Jamaica yesterday.
Minister of Health and Wellness Dr Christopher Tufton announced the island’s first confirmed case of the virus in an emergency press conference yesterday at the Ministry’s headquarter. The infected patient is a Jamaican woman who travelled from the United Kingdom which has 67 cases of the virus. Jamaica has now become the fourth Caribbean country with the virus joining the Dominican Republic, St Martin and St Barts. In response, the Government has decided to withdraw participation from the Penn Relays scheduled for next month in Philadelphia and a decision is expected to made today whether Boys and Girls’ Champs will proceed as planned. With less than two weeks before it’s scheduled to begin, Blake said that while it will have a mass effect on the athletic schedule, safety must come first.
“It will disrupt the track and field calendar but extreme times call for extreme measures,” Blake told The Gleaner. “Our main aim has to be to mitigate what was happened and minimise the number of cases in Jamaica. That has to be our main aim and that supersedes any track and field meeting.”
Blake had commented earlier that Champs could be held in an empty stadium as a combative measure but he was put off by the negative response to the suggestion although countries across Europe have made similar decisions in their football leagues. Both UEFA Champions League matches yesterday, Germany’s RB Leipzig versus England’s Tottenham Hotspurs and Spain’s Valencia versus Atalanta of Italy, were played without spectators. He said that any decision taken going forward would have to be done in conjunction with a risk assessment of the current situation.
“It wasn’t anything new (competing without spectators) because if you are putting crowds together it’s going to be a danger to public health. So either you are going to cancel outright or you are going to have it with minimum spectators,” he said. “We have to assess and see how strong a danger it is because if it’s out in the community, then we have a real problem …”
Carifta under threat
The Carifta Games scheduled for Bermuda next month are also under threat and a decision will be made on that as well today according to Blake. He also confirmed that he will be in dialogue with Inter-secondary School Sports Association (ISSA) president Keith Wellington as to the plans going forward for Champs. Wellington had previously indicated that they will take a stringent approach to limit exposure but when contacted yesterday regarding the future of the event, he said that he would not offer comment until a final decision has been made.
Tufton has also warned that the new developments have put events in the island at risk. “Needless to say, the fact that we now have a case, nevertheless an imported case, it does elevate the concerns as it relates to public gatherings and that could be applied to all major public gatherings for the time being,” he said.
Meanwhile, Kingston College head coach Leaford Grant said that his team will continue preparations until otherwise told not to and is hopefully that Champs can still go ahead.
“Hopefully the extreme is not taken. The wider public would be very disappointed. I don’t want to go to the extreme,” he said. “It is a single case so I believe that good sense will prevail and Boys and Girls’ Champs will go forward.”
Various sporting events worldwide have had to be postponed or cancelled due to the severe cases in Asia and in Europe. Italy on Monday instituted the strictest measures to date barring all sporting events in the country until early April.