Relay lows and highs

It's sad to know that the 1980 Olympic women's 4x100 team had such a tough time.

As revealed in a recent story in these pages, discomforts among the team members linger to this day. Ironically, while Jamaica now has an awesome record in the 4x100 at the World Championships, pickings at the Olympics have been much slimmer.

The 1980 Olympic team finished sixth. No one could have known that the Games would be an unhappy hunting ground for our women's 4x100 for the next 16 years.

In 1983, three of the women who ran the relay in Moscow - Merlene Ottey, Jackie Pusey and Leileth Hodges - got some redemption. A storming Ottey anchor reeled in the bronze medal.

Unfortunately, the Olympic jinx was back in 1984 in Los Angeles. A late swap - Veronica Findlay for Juliet Cuthbert - was punished when Findlay was unable to connect with 200 finalist Grace Jackson at the first exchange. A certain medal was lost.

Four years later, in the 1988 Seoul Olympics, Jamaica again reached the final. Injury unfortunately knocked Ottey and Cuthbert to the sideline and the team couldn't run the final.

Close call

It was the same old story at the Barcelona Olympics in 1992. Cuthbert was blazing after a double silver medal performance in the individual sprints, but pulled up on the second leg in the final. It was a hateful sight.

It took some pain to lift the curse. In Atlanta 1996, Ottey had matched Cuthbert's Barcelona double, but would have been horrified to see Nikole Mitchell shudder with a leg injury on the third leg. To her eternal credit, Mitchell held on long enough to get the baton to Ottey.

Then 36, the doyen of Jamaica's female sprinting produced a 9.83-second anchor leg to grab third place.

In 2000, in Sydney, disputes cut sprint relay practice to next to nothing, but Jamaica, with Ottey on anchor, got the silver.

Ottey was in Athens in 2004, but by then, she was representing Slovenia. Tayna Lawrence, Sherone Simpson, Aleen Bailey and Veronica Campbell-Brown ran like the wind and took the gold medal in 41.74 seconds. Years of waiting had come to an end.

A repeat win seemed imminent after the 2008 Beijing 1-2-2 and a successful 200-metre defence win for VCB. That never happened. Joint 100 silver medal winners Simpson and Kerron Stewart never connected the second exchange and a certain gold medal went abegging.

Of course, Jamaica was soundly beaten by a world record-setting USA team at last year's London Olympics.

One gold, two silver and one bronze hardly seems to do Jamaica's sprint prowess justice, but that is our Olympic medal haul in the women's 4x100.

The World Championships have been kinder. Jamaica entered the 4x100 13 times in the 14 stagings of the meet and won 12 medals. The 2013 triumph, anchored by superstar Shelly-Ann Fraser-Pryce, was the third overall following wins in 1991 and 2009. Five silver medals and four bronzes add to an imposing portfolio.

Our time now

Some believe that the fastest runner should always run the anchor leg. Jamaica tends to follow that prescription. Ottey, VCB and now Fraser-Pryce have done that job splendidly. That shouldn't be gospel. After all, Usain Bolt has done a great job on the third leg.

A lot depends on practice and that is what many teams lack. As Patrick Robinson, the second leg on the 1964 Olympic fourth-place team, reminded us all in a recent letter to the editor, baton passing may even be more important than speed.

Practice narrows down the risk involved in making three baton exchanges at high speed. Since those painful days in 1980, it's a challenge that, in general, with discomfort, Jamaica seems to have solved. The misery of Moscow 1980 is a signal that meticulous relay management must be maintained.

Hubert Lawrence has been making notes at trackside since 1980.