Modest expectations at Pan Am Games

The last time the Pan American Games were this late in the year, Jamaica managed to come home with one gold in a total of five medals. That came after a four-gold, nine-medal haul at the 2011 World Championships, and included an important victory by Lerone Clarke who continued the nation’s world supremacy in the men’s 100 metres.

As it was on October 22, 2011, when track and field started at those Pan-American Games, this year’s Games commence long after the rest of the international track and field circuit has ended. Consequently, none of our 2023 World Championships medal-winners have opted to compete. In 2011, Yohan Blake, Usain Bolt, Veronica Campbell-Brown and Melaine Walker won individual World Championships medals and then turned their attention to the 2012 Olympics. The situation is the same now for current world champions Shericka Jackson, Antonio Watson and Danielle Williams.

By this time of the year, most athletes have got some well-earned rest and returned to training for the 2024 Olympics.

TURNING POINT

The Games used to be huge for track and field, but a turning point arrived 40 years ago with the introduction of the World Championships. Up to that point, the Olympic Games was the de facto World Championships of athletics and when World Athletics, the governing body of the sport, enacted the World Championships, it landed in the same year as the Pan-American Games.

When World Athletics offered Mercedes Benz cars to the winners in 1993 and then prize money for finalists in 1997, there was less reason to prioritise the Games.

The hemisphere’s best compete in reasonable numbers when the Games precede the World Championships as in 2019, when the Games were staged in Lima, Peru. Elaine Thompson Herah took the 100m, with Shelly-Ann Fraser Pryce and Natoya Goule-Toppin scoring gold in the 200m and 800m respectively. It seemed to be an opportunity to simulate the repeat rounds they would face at the World Championships, which began late in September.

The Pan-American Games hold no such advantage for the world’s best track and field athletes in 2023. To be fair, they remain of enormous value to athletes in other sports because the level of competition is high. However, for track and field athletes, the cost of delaying the start to their Olympic preparations is too high.

All is not lost. Jamaica will march into Santiago, Chile for this year’s Games with Fedrick Dacres, the 2015 and 2019 discus champion leading the line in athletics and with medal hopes in badminton, 3x3 basketball and boxing. If Dacres manages to win for the third Games in a row, it will be another worthy achievement for the man who is Jamaica’s most accomplished thrower.

Action in Santiago starts with the men’s and women’s marathon races on October 22.

Hubert Lawrence has made notes at track side since 1980.