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Hold your head up

Published:Thursday | April 17, 2014 | 12:00 AM
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Six members of the crack Kingston College track and field team who competed in the Penn Relays in 1964, a week after the North Street-based school team won the annual Boys' Championships for a third consecutive year. The athletes (from left) are Lennox Tulloch, Alex MacDonald (captain), Rupert Hoilette, Tony Keyes, Jimmy Grant and Lennox Miller. Tulloch competed in the triple jump then known as the hop-step-jump. Miller, Keyes, Hoilette and Grant ran in the sprint relay. - File
Una Morris
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Fifty years have passed since Rupert Hoilette, Una Morris and Neville Myton emerged from Boys Championships and Girls' Championships as Olympic prospects. If you fast-forward 50 years to Champs 2014, you'll find great similarities.

Like Calabar in 2014, the 1964 Kingston College team won Boys' Champs handsomely. Titchfield was well clear of their rivals in Girls' Champs and, like Edwin Allen High this year, won for the second time. Taken together, 21 records fell in 1964, one more than this year. Fourteen new marks each were set at Boys' Champs 1964 and 2014.

Fans who thought they were watching future Olympians in 1964 were right. Morris set a national 220-yard record at Girls' Champs and went on to place fourth at the Tokyo Olympics in the 200m later that year at 17. She set a long-standing Jamaican 200m record with that effort.

That is the best ever Olympic/World Championship finish by a Jamaican junior. Nikole Mitchell's seventh place in the 1993 World Championships 100m final runs a close second.

Myton and Hoilette both went to Tokyo, with Myton booking his place with a world junior record in the 880 yards. Converted to one minute 46.5 seconds for 800 metres, it is still the national junior record.

Hoilette's speed helped Kingston College set a world junior 4x440 yards record in 1965. Those teams included the late Lennox Miller. Miller became one of the world's best sprinters, with Olympic 100m silver and bronze as proof.

Hoilette, Jimmy Grant, Tony Keyes and Miller are being honoured by the Penn Relays next week, 50 years after KC became the first Jamaican school to compete at Penn. Alex McDonald, who held the Champs 880 yards record before Myton, and Len Tulloch, the Champs triple jump winner, were there too. They made Jamaica's entry a triumphant one as they won the 4x110 yards relay.

BRILLIANT IN ATHLETICS

If your head has dropped because of recent bad news, take heart. Jamaica has been really fast at the junior level for at least 50 years. Hoilette, Morris and Myton are living testimony of that fact.

In an era long before synthetic tracks, magic spray, Gatorade and kinesio tape, Jamaica was brilliant in athletics. She still is. Super champions Usain Bolt and Shelly-Ann Fraser-Pryce lead a line that extends to high jump prospect Christoff Bryan, speedy sprinter Christania Williams, hurdlers like Jaheel Hyde, Yanique Thompson and Peta-Gaye Williams and world leading thrower Federick Dacres.

With all the bad news in the air, it's pretty grim. When it gets really bad, think through the last 50 years. The memories will lift your head up.

HUBERT LAWRENCE has attended Champs since 1980.