Pocket Rocket 2.0?

Paris, France:

THE SIMILARITY between Tia Clayton’s arrival on the world’s biggest stage and 2008 when an unknown Shelly-Ann Fraser announced herself is not lost on MVP coach Stephen Francis, but he is still cautiously optimistic about the chances of the Olympic debutant creating a surprise of her own.

The athletics programme of the Paris Olympic games begins today with the men’s and women’s 20 kilometre walk, but events on the track will commence tomorrow with the women’s 100 metres starting at 4:50 a.m. Jamaica time.

Clayton makes her Olympic debut, having finished second at the national trials in 10.90 seconds in June. Clayton took a big step forward this season, with the first sub-11 clocking of her career, a 10.86 effort in the semi-finals of the national championships earlier that night.

According to Francis, Clayton did not run a perfect race that evening, but he is eager to see how she performs on the biggest stage.

“The only question is, will she be at her best? She was slightly off at the national championships. And am I expecting that this time she will be at her very best. And we will see what happens as a result,” Francis said.

What could happen is a similar situation to 2008 when an unknown Shelly-Ann Fraser won her first Olympic title. But Francis was cautious to draw comparisons given that Fraser-Pryce was more mature than Clayton when she took gold.

“She is young. She is 20 next month. At the time when Shelly won, she was relatively mature. She was 22 that same year. It is all a matter of what Tia wants. Nobody knows how she is going to approach it,” Francis said.

However, Francis says that given that she could have been much faster at the national championships, he is eager to see how well she fares in her first senior global championships.

“But I do know is that we are hoping that this time, she is going to perform at her best, unlike the trials, where she left a couple of tenths of a second or so on the table.”

Daniel Wheeler