By Neto Baptiste
Almost 350 athletes have registered to take part in this weekend’s National Track & Field Championships to be hosted by the Antigua and Barbuda Athletics Association (ABAA) with a large number expected from neighbouring islands.
This is according to the meet’s director and an executive member of the athletics association, Kesswin Anthony, who said that on last count, 348 have registered for the championships while he assured that times ran during the two-day event will be recognised by World Athletics.
“The majority of the athletes are here; we have some coming in [Thursday] and the final set from Montserrat will be in on Saturday morning. All the athletes are upbeat, my team is ready, the technical team is ready and our technician from St Kitts is here so we will be getting official timing that will be recognised by World Athletics so everything is on track,” he said.
A number of the country’s top athletes are set to compete in the National Championships at the YASCO Sports Complex with Anthony revealing there will be ample outside competition.
“The 100 meters finals is on Saturday and the next premier event, the 200 meters finals, is on Sunday. Start time is 3pm and we’re looking to close off at 7:30 to 8pm latest. All the registration was done so we have 348 athletes registered. We have Parish League Cricket that should be doing a live stream and we also have More Sports Antigua that should be live streaming it, and Anguilla normally comes with their people who do their streaming through their page as well. We have also written to ABS, we don’t know if it will be carried live but we will stream it through our page from Neville [More Sports Antigua] or from Parish League Cricket,” he said.
Top male sprinter Cejhae Greene, Dwayne Fleming, Soniya Jones, Darion Skerritt and jumpers Sheldon Noble and Taeco O’Garro are all scheduled to compete this weekend.