More considerations for Sportsman and Woman awards

The nominees for this year’s RJRGLEANER Sportswoman and Sportsman of the Year Awards are all super choices, with Budapest World Champions Shericka Jackson, Antonio Watson and Danielle Williams leading the way. Still, there are two names, Khadija Shaw and Jaydon Hibbert, I would add to the nominees list.

Shaw has been so good that she has been nominated for the Ballon D’Or. That award crowns the winner the best footballer in the world. She has poured the goals in for Manchester City in the Women’s Super League and she led her country Jamaica to a historic berth in the knockout round at the Women’s World Cup.

The Ballon D’Or nomination is massive. To my best knowledge, she is the first Jamaican, male or female, to earn such an honour. When you add that to her determined display in the World Cup, her willingness to chase lost causes on a team that didn’t create many goal chances, she’d definitely be on my list of nominees.

Lest we forget, Hibbert won both the indoor and outdoor NCAA triple jump titles, and at the Jamaica Championships, where Watson lost a thriller to Sean Bailey, the lanky University of Arkansas stand-out reigned supreme. Like Watson, he only lost once, a last round heartbreak to Fabrice Zango of Burkino Faso in Monaco.

There are two measures by which Hibbert is the best triple-jumper in the world for 2023. Firstly, he has the longest jump in the world this year at 17.87 metres. Secondly, in Budapest, he qualified for the final with an imposing leap of 17.70m. With injury stopping Hibbert early in the final, Zango produced a winning mark of 17.64m. That’s six centimetres short of the young Jamaican’s qualifying leader.

With no medal to show for his effort in Budapest, Hibbert is well adrift of Watson and 110m hurdles runner-up Hansle Parchment in the race for this prestigious award. However, on a year-long basis, Hibbert is the globe’s best triple-jumper.

As testimony, the world performance list shows that the tall 18-year-old has five of the top-ten jumps of the year.

By comparison, Watson’s wondrous personal best in the Budapest 400m semis - 44.13 seconds - makes him the world number-five.

Shaw’s candidacy might have been affected by her role in the anti-JFF protest by the senior Reggae Girlz. If so, she wouldn’t be the first to suffer because of matters away from the field of play. In 1968, as part of an athlete protest against an official carrying the Jamaican flag in the opening ceremony at the Mexico Olympics, Olympic 100m runner-up Lennox Miller ditched official team gear for an all-white PE outfit. His silver was Jamaica’s only medal in Mexico.

The 1968 Sportsman of the Year was Caribbean Table Tennis champion Orville Haslam.

Be that as it may. The awards will be presented in January and perhaps, by then, there will be nominations for Shaw and Hibbert.

Hubert Lawrence has made notes at trackside since 1980.