Sprint Fest opens 2023 season at JC

Jura Levy, a World Championships and Olympic Games medal winner, will headline the first local meet of the 2023 track and field season. Levy will test her speed at the On Di Run Sprint Fest, which is being staged today on the grounds of Jamaica College (JC) in St Andrew.

Like everyone else at the Sprint Fest, the diminutive Levy will be running 200 metres, where she has a personal best of 22.76 seconds.

Levy produced a sterling first 4x200 metres leg at the 2017 World Relays. That race ended with a win for Jamaica in the national record time of one minute 29.04 seconds. The United States and East Germany are the only nations to ever go faster.

Top billing on the male side of the meet goes to the Penn Relay-winning Camperdown High School trio of Rimando Thomas, Junior Harris and Jason Lewis. Last year, with former schoolmate Roshawn Clarke on anchor, Thomas, Harris and Lewis pulled off a surprise in the Championship of America 4x100 metres relay to win in 40.13 seconds.

Ironically, the Okeile Stewart-coached unit clocked the same time achieved by the last Camperdown quartet to win the event at the relay carnival 16 years earlier.

Lewis is in his first year in Class One, having placed third in the Class Two 100 at Boys and Girls’ Athletics Championships in 2022.

The champion Camperdown trio will contest the Class One 200m alongside Adrian Kerr of Kingston College, who helped Jamaica to the 4x100m silver at last year’s World Athletics Under-20 Championships in Cali, Colombia.

Kerr won the gold medal in the Class Three 200m at Boys and Girls’ Athletics Championships in 2018.

The first Sprint Fest was put on last year at the G.C. Foster College for Physical Education and Sport by veteran meet manager and results expert Wayne Long. Young prospects Sandrey Davison, Brianna Lyston and Gregory Prince provided the highlights there. Davison and Prince, then of St Catherine and St Jago high Schools respectively, zipped the fastest Class One 100m times of the season to that point at 10.59 and 10.70, while Lyston, then at Hydel High School, did 11.51 seconds in her Class One 100m race.

Davison went on to retain his national under-20 100m title, while Lyston and Prince also had success. She won the 200m at Boys and Girls’ Athletics Championships, the Carifta Games and the World Athletics Under 20 Championships while Prince won at Champs and raced his way on to Jamaica’s senior team to the World Championships in Eugene.

With this Sprint Fest coming a month earlier in the season, On Di Run has put the 200m on its schedule rather than the 100m.