‘I’m in my own lane’

THE 100-METRE hurdles is the event in which there is the most at stake at the upcoming National Senior Championships. Even with last year’s World Championship runner-up Britany Anderson injured and out for the season, Jamaica has a wealth of fine competitors, and given that there is no sprint hurdles relay, only three can go to Budapest for this year’s Worlds.

Four Jamaicans – 2021 World Under-20 champion, Ackera Nugent, 2015 World champion Danielle Williams, 2021 Olympic bronze medal winner, Megan Tapper, and 2022 World Under-20 champion Kerrica Hill – are among the 16 women across the globe who have already hurdled past the World Championships qualifying standard of 12.78 seconds.

Nugent leads the 2023 performance list with a run of 12.43 seconds on May 13.

In Freeport on the same day, Tapper advanced to a season’s best of 12.74 seconds in the Bahamas to outlast two-time Carifta champion Amoi Brown, who came close to the qualifying mark with a time of 12.81 seconds. Asked at trackside about her plans for Budapest, Tapper replied, “To just keep getting better, to keep improving Megan because at the end of the day, that’s all I can do.”

COMPACT TAPPER

Some write Tapper off because she is compact but that is a mistake. In addition to her historic bronze, Jamaica’s first medal in the event at the Olympics, Tapper has won the Nationals twice, in 2016 and 2021, raced in the 2019 World final and owns a bronze medal from the 2019 Pan-Am Games.

She got two races under her belt in The Bahamas in the NACAC New Life Invitationals, held in Freeport. Untidy in her 12.99 opener at the 13th Velocity Fest in Kingston, she looked smoother at the Doha Diamond League meet, placing fourth in 12.76. In Freeport, she won her prelim comfortably in 12.87 seconds and came back later to beat Brown in the final.

She took the silver medal at last year’s NACAC Championships on the same track and was happy to return. “Freeport is always exciting to run at. You always get really good times. I was looking forward to a good time today, and I’m not disappointed,” she reviewed.

“I came out here to just execute what we’ve been practising in training, and I think I did that fairly well. It’s a good ground to continue on and I’m really grateful and happy to be here,” she said in reference to training work she is doing at the Elite Performance club with coach Reynaldo Walcott.

Her preparations are guided solely by the things she can control – namely, herself. “I’m in my own lane. I can’t decide or say what anyone else is going to do but only me. So that’s what I try to focus 100 per cent, staying healthy and just staying focused and positive and giving God all the glory in time,” the St Andrew High graduate resolved.

The Nationals are set for July.