Powell, the Jamaican powerhouse

Although he missed out on the medals at the Athens Olympic Games, Asafa Powell was the sprinting revelation of the year. Jean-Philippe Leclaire spoke to the young Jamaican who ran a phenomenal 9 times under 10 seconds this summer.

It is hard to believe that it is only four years since Asafa Powell took up running. The 22-year old - he is born in November 1982 - explains that, back in 2000, he was content simply to watch TV at home or else go to school, and then to church on Sundays.

The softly-spoken young man – a rarity in a discipline where most of the competitors are brash and loud – is the brother of Donovan Powell, who reached the semi-finals of the Seville World Championships’ 100m.

His brother’s successes are what prompted him to start taking an interest in Track and Field, and he followed every event of the Sydney Olympics on TV. He was, he says, particularly struck by Maurice Greene.

"I loved the way he always seemed to be in total control of what was happening. I also liked the fact that, simply by his attitude before the race, he already seemed to be dominating his opponents.”

Since then, of course, Powell has beaten Greene several times and his statistics for the 2004 summer season speak for themselves: two defeats for thirteen victories, and nine runs under ten seconds (every one of them legal). Only Maurice Greene himself has ever done better when, in 1999, he won 16 races with eleven sub ten-second times.

In the space of just a few weeks the young Jamaican and his American rival faced each other three times. Powell first won a dazzling victory in London (9.91 to Greene’s 9.97) and then again in Zurich (9.93 to 9.94), before losing in Athens, in the Olympic final, a defeat which tarnished an otherwise perfect year for Asafa Powell.

In Athens, although he was a favourite to win, he managed only a distant fifth place, albeit in the honourable time of 9.94. In front of him, even faster, were Justin Gatlin (9.85), Francis Obikwelu (9.86), Maurice Greene (9.87) and Shawn Crawford (9.89).

However, the rookie sprinter remained upbeat. As he explains: “When I reached the finishing line in the Olympic final, I was happy, I was laughing. In spite of a poor start, I had still managed to run 9.94!”
 
It remains, however, that the young man could have established himself as a living legend there and then, had he succeeded in becoming the first Jamaican to be crowned 100m Olympic champion. In the past, Arthur Wint (1948) and George Rhoden (1952) have won Olympic gold medals in the 400m, Don Quarrie in the 200 (1976), Deon Hemmings in the 400m hurdles (1996), and of course there was the 200m Olympic title in Athens of Veronica Campbell. But the ‘king of track events’ still eludes Jamaica.

The closest the West Indies’ island can come to laying claim to it is probably when, in 1992, Linford Christie, born on the 2nd of April 1960 in Saint-Andrews, a town north of Kingston, won the title, even if he did it running under British colours. Four years later, in Atlanta, Donovan Bailey, another Jamaican-born sprinter, again won the 100m, but this time it was for Canada that he was racing.

With Asafa Powell, there is no ambiguity as to how Jamaican he is.

The son of a preacher from Spanish Town, the historical capital of the country, Powell, the youngest of six brothers, is adamant that he will never move away. Moreover, he has hopes that his successes may give food for thought to others who have ‘strayed’. His mantra, all through the summer was that he would dearly like that his success inspire ‘…some of our youngsters who have left for the States to come back home’.

Indeed the Jamaicans, intensely proud of their traditions and country, have been applying the motto ‘Proud to be Jamaican’ to the way in which they are seeking to develop Track and Field on the island.

The local sporting authorities are looking to stem the tide of expatriates to the USA, a trend which started as far back as the 1940s, when Herb McKenley left to study at Boston College before finishing second in the 1948 London Olympic Games. 

If it is undeniable that some top-class athletes benefited greatly from such schemes (people like George Rhoden, Lennox Miller, Don Quarrie, Juliet Cuthbert, Merlene Ottey or Veronica Campbell to name but a few), others lost out by leaving the island for a scholarship to an American University.

That, at any rate, is the opinion firmly held by Teddy McCook, the ex President of the Jamaican Athletics Federation and a serving member of the IAAF Council. He says: “If you take the fifty to sixty Jamaican athletes who are currently studying with an athletics scholarship in the USA, we estimate that no more than 10% will actually ever race for Jamaica. In the past, a lot of these youngsters have given up athletics altogether, and some have even been known to turn to a life of crime or to have become drug addicts."

Thanks in part to Teddy McCook, the IAAF set up, three years ago, a 'High Performance Training Centre', located on the campus of the University of Technology. The 'HPTC' only has a grass track, and the weight machines in its gym are rather old.

“This is only a beginning; we need time for it to come together," pleads Teddy McCook. Whilst Asafa Powell does use the installations of the Centre (along with the two synthetic tracks of Kingston's National Stadium), he is not himself a product of this circuit.

Powell has been mentored outside any conventional system by the imposing figure of Stephen Francis. Francis, never to be seen without his cap, presents himself as the first Jamaican coach to have set up a 100% professional athletics group on the island.

Having launched the project in partnership with Brigitte Foster (World 100m Hurdles' silver medalist), Francis spotted Powell's talent at the annual school national championships, which take place in front of 35,000 spectators, who flock to the Kingston National Stadium every March.

The year was 2001, and Francis must have been the only person there to have spotted anything special about the young man who finished fourth in the 100m in a time of 10.61.

As he explains: "I really thought I knew every single young hope on the island, but I had never even heard of Asafa. Of course, you must remember that he was at Charlemont, probably one of the worst schools there is for Track..." At this point, Powell chips in: "No - THE worst!"

Until he met Francis, Powell had been training, or rather, running, on his own.

“I had been to stay with my brother Donovan in Texas. I had picked up some routines and ideas watching his training sessions, but, surprising as it may be, my own  brother did not see my potential, and it took Francis to spot it and help me develop it," recalls Powell.

Their relationship has been, over the past three years, anything but easy, as - if Francis is to be believed - Asafa has never been the hardest working of athletes...

The partnership flourished though, as the results of the young sprinter began to make the world sit up and take notice. In the three years between 2001 and 2004, Powell went from 10.50 to 9.87, his current personal record, set in Brussels on 3 September, the fastest time ever run by somebody so young.

His rise has been phenomenal, with, to date, only one setback, other than his disappointment in Athens: in Paris he was disqualified for a false-start. This happened in the same race which saw Jon Drummond hold up proceedings for a full fifteen minutes when he also was disqualified.

Powell, though, simply walked away, telling himself that he was young and that he would have many other chances to show his worth.

Published in IAAF Magazine Issue 4 - 2004