Ja’s pioneering track star Isis Clarke-Reid dies at 100

Jamaica’s first track and field star, Isis Clarke-Reid, died at her Port St Lucie, Florida, home on Monday, June 8, after a brief illness. She was 100 years old.

At the time of her death, Clarke-Reid was wheelchair-mobile and suffered from dementia.

While she had become frail in recent years, her family has been devastated by the news and is particularly disheartened that she did not get the recognition they thought she deserved from the Jamaican Government.

Reports in the local media around the time the former track star celebrated her 100th birthday on November 18, 2019, stated that the family’s only wish was that she be recognised publicly by the Jamaican Government before she passed.

That shattered dream has rocked her only surviving brother, David Clarke, with whom she lived, a family friend told The Gleaner. Her in-laws, with whom she also lived, are said to be heartbroken.

“I am aware that something was being planned for the minister of sport to visit with her,” the family friend, who did not wish to be named, said of Olivia Grange.

“But I kept reminding them that she was 100 years old,” she added.

The friend acknowledged that the COVID-19 pandemic that emerged in Wuhan, China, in December 2019, changed the dynamic, effectively shutting down international travel and upending whatever plans Grange might have been fine-tuning.

SHOULD HAVE BEEN RECOGNISED SOONER

Nonetheless, the friend believes that with the family emphasising Clarke-Reid’s frail health in November, greater effort should have been made much earlier to recognise her place in history.

“They really should have moved more quickly,” she said.

Born in Kingston on November 18, 1919, Clarke-Reid regularly broke her own national records at various track meets that were held in the 1930s, Gleaner reports show.

“(Clarke-Reid) and Gertrude Messam were the first women to represent Jamaica in track and field,” said David last November when he spoke with the media ahead of his sister’s birthday.

“She never got any recognition for paving the way for other females in track and field,” David lamented.

Clarke-Reid represented Jamaica at 100m, 200m, and the 80m low hurdles. She first represented the country at the 1938 Central American and Caribbean (CAC) Games when she was only 19 and when Jamaica competed under the British colonial flag.

Clarke-Reid was part of the quartet that included Messam, Rhona Saunders, and Beryl Delgado that won a bronze medal for Jamaica in the 4x100m relay at the 1938 CAC Games in Panama City.

Following the war, the CAC Games were held in 1946, this time in Barranquilla, Colombia. Clarke-Reid was the only returnee from the 1938 relay team, and this time, she was joined by Cynthia Thompson, Hyacinth Walters, and Cynthia Llewelyn. The Jamaicans mined silver that year behind Panama, which was a force in track and field in those early years. The great Herb McKenley was part of the 1946 team.

According to newspaper articles from 1938-1939, when she dominated local sprinting, she was affectionately called ‘Champion Girl Sprinter’.

Last November, as she reflected on her time on the track eight decades earlier, Clarke-Reid said: “It was great. I felt like a champion.”