By Neto Baptiste
National track and field coach and a member of the Antigua and Barbuda Athletics Association (ABAA), Kesswin Anthony, has labelled entry standards for this year’s Paris Olympics as “rough”, adding that it has been difficult for some athletes to make the grade.
To date, only two Antigua and Barbuda track athletes, sprinters Cejhae Greene and Joella Lloyd, have qualified for the July 26 to August 11 Games. Greene hit the men’s 100 meters qualifying mark of 10.00 seconds flat while competing at the PURE Athletics Sprint Elite Meet held in Florida last month, while Lloyd clocked 11.06 seconds at the 4th NCAA Championships held in Lexington, Kentucky late May to better the 11.07 entry standard for the Games.
“That kind of time you are asking these athletes to run just to qualify for the Olympics are times that would usually get these athletes into the finals so I don’t know if it is that they are trying to up the competition or for TV rights, but the standards are rough and it’s the highest we’ve seen in years,” he said.
The qualifying mark in the men’s 200 meters is 20.16 seconds while the entry standard for the women is 22.57 seconds. No athlete from Antigua and Barbuda has qualified for that event.
Anthony said he was hoping that a number of the budding senior athletes could have made the grade.
“When you look at the Olympics on a whole, it is the pinnacle of track and field in the world and we normally have one or two athletes every time the Olympics comes around in track and field, so we were looking forward to having at least our premier athletes at this meet,” he said.
“We have Shavique Bascus who is basically new to us, running pretty well on the college circuit, and got down to 20.5 and we were hoping for him to get the standard. We have Darion Skerritt who is in Jamaica and we were hoping for him to also get the standard. We also have Barak Matthew, we have our field events athletes in Dahlia Barnes, Sheldon Noble, we have Travis and so we were hoping to get at least more athletes,” he added.
Kite-surfer, Tiger Tyson, was the first Antigua and Barbuda athlete to qualify for the Paris Olympics in December last year.
The cut off for qualification to the Paris Olympics is June 30. Athletes here will get a final opportunity to hit the qualifying standards in various categories when the athletics association host it’s national championships on June 29 and 30.
