To run or not to run

We were all stunned when World Champion Veronica Campbell-Brown failed to finish in the top three spots in the women's 100-metre finals at the national trials last weekend.

In what was perhaps the most exciting race of the weekend, won by Kerron Stewart, Campbell-Brown was also outrun by relative newcomer Shelly-Ann Fraser and 2006 Commonwealth Games 200-metre champion Sherone Simpson.

The thing that stands out for me is that Campbell-Brown ran the race in 10.88 seconds, the fastest time she has run all year, yet she was soundly beaten.

Trelawny

I have always loved Veronica. She is from my parish; Trelawny and she married a man who attended Albert Town High at a time when my mom was vice principal. I even interviewed him after he raised eyebrows with a 10.3 clocking to win at Boys Champs back in the early 1990s.

Veronica has also served Jamaica well but what I love most about her is that she has the guts of a burglar and the heart of a champion. She never holds anything back, she leaves it all out there on the track - win or lose.

So now under the rules governing selection to the team to Beijing, Campbell-Brown is the alternate for the women's 100 metres. Meaning, if one of the top three women is unable to participate she will fill that slot.

However, based on what is being said there are some people who, given their own way, would have her already pencilled into that slot. And it's wrong.

They argue that VCB, as our champion is affectionately called, should be made to run the 100m because she is seasoned and the Americans, our biggest rivals in the sprints, fear her. All that might be true but if she was not good enough to make our team in that event, why should we give her a pass. The woman ran her season-best time and was beaten. It's as simple as that.

Last year when American 400 metre champion Sanya Richards failed to qualify for the World Championships team, did anybody say Sanya needed to be representing the US because the other girls were not good enough? No! She sat on the sidelines in Osaka and watched her teammates represent her country and watched as two Britons and a Jamaican won the medals.

Maybe that is what some people are afraid of. They don't think that Stewart, Fraser and Simpson can represent Jamaica well enough. But check this out: the least experienced of these three women has run faster than VCB.

trailing wind

Fraser's personal best, the 10.85 she ran in the finals last Saturday, is faster than VCB's personal best of 10.85. Confused? Let me explain. When an athlete runs a flat race, the speed of the trailing wind has some influence on how fast the athlete runs. For a time to be ratified as legal, a trailing wind cannot exceed two metres per second. That is why Tyson Gay's 9.68 over the weekend did not supplant Usain Bolt's 9.72 as the world record because Gay had a mini-hurricane of 4.1 m/s pushing him to the line.

There was less wind, much less wind 'pushing' Fraser last Saturday than was 'pushing' Campbell-Brown when she ran her time two years ago, so technically, the former is faster because she was doing it more off her own steam. And so are Simpson and Stewart. What that means is that putting VCB in would amount to substituting a faster athlete with a slower one and that, well, just defies logic.

The bottom line is this. The rules say the first three past the post should represent the country in the event and that is what should happen. No substitutions should be made unless one of the women who earned places on the team gets hurt or is otherwise unable to go when the Games start in just over a month's time.

Anything else would be a bad move because the Sydney Games in Australia was not that long ago and we certainly would not want a repeat of that fiasco now, would we?

All these women have worked hard for their success, what gives anyone the right to want to deny them the fruit of their labour?

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