Africans helping to lift interest in local distance running - Wellington

The arrival of African student-athletes may have heightened interest in distance running in Jamaica. That’s the estimation from Keith Wellington, president of the Inter-Secondary Schools Sports Association (ISSA), the governing body of high-school sport in Jamaica.

Reacting on Wednesday to the recent suggestions that Africans are helping Jamaicans to make progress in the middle- and long-distance events, Wellington said: “If there is anything that you may want to attribute to their involvement, it may be a growth in interest, not necessarily in performances.”

Of the 10 middle- and long-distance records on the Boys and Girls’ Championships record books, only one - the boys’ 2000-metre steeplechase - belongs to an African student-athlete, in this case Aryamanya Rodgers, a Ugandan who attended Kingston College. His record time was five minutes 49.46 seconds in 2018.

“When you look at the records, when you look at the times that are run by our local-bred athletes, they compare favourably with those who have come in,” Wellington said.

Champs has a long history of showcasing overseas student-athletes. In 2023, Trinidad and Tobago’s Natasha Fox was on duty for Edwin Allen High School, Cayman Islands’ Jaiden Reid sprinted for Jamaica College, with Kenyan Nathan Gioko winning the 5000m for Kingston College. Another Kenyan, Florence Nafamba, ran the 2023 steeplechase for Holmwood Technical.

“Obviously, the prospect of seeing an African competing with a Jamaican with the perception that if you’re from Africa, you normally do well at distance running, that may have heightened some interest, but I’m not sure that it has significantly impacted our performances,” Wellington concluded.

On a related matter, Wellington pushed aside the possibility where individual schools could have more than two representatives per event at Championships. Two years ago, ISSA moved away from qualifying via meeting of a set standard to the compilation of a ranking list of performances during the high-school season, with each school allowed a maximum of two student-athletes per event.

Asked if reliance on the ranking list could loosen the two-per-school-per-event stipulation, which has been part and parcel of the championships since its inception in 1910, he replied, “If we allow that, we could see one school with six-seven competitors in an event. So I’m not sure that would be considered favourably.”

The ranking-list system has helped ISSA to streamline its Champs schedule.

“One of the objectives we had with the ranking system was to allow us to better plan our schedule based on the fact that we would now fully determine how many persons we would have in each event. We would know once we start doing the schedule before entries are done what number of heats, for example, and the time that is required to complete a particular event. So that is something that we have been able to achieve,” he underlined.