By Neto Baptiste
Although admitting it would prove difficult to bring everyone together often, national sprinter Cejhae Greene believes the country could field a formidable relay team.
Speaking on the Good Morning Jojo Sports Show, Greene said that with the hectic professional circuit, finding the time to dedicate to training with a relay team could prove difficult, but he said that he is willing to make the effort if it means pushing the country’s name further on the international scene.
“It comes to a point when we get to the meet and they’re asking me, Cejhae where is your relay team? And it hurts because you really want to go out there and do well in a relay. I will say, on the athletics association’s point of view, it is hard getting all of us together because obviously I am still running on the professional circuit, and getting all the other guys to come together and practice gets hard sometimes, but I do think a lot more can be done towards that, and it’s not like the athletes are against it because earlier this year, we tried out best to get it done,” he said.
Greene, who ran a season best of 10.01 seconds in March this year, represented Antigua and Barbuda at the recent Tokyo Olympics but did not advance beyond the opening round.
Asked whether or not the pressures of having to shoulder the expectations of a nation may have been too much, Greene said the effectiveness of his support staff nullified any pressure he felt going into the event.
“There was a lot of pressure in a sense, but as an athlete, you learn how to deal with that and for me personally, if I deal with everything then it would become too much pressure, but I can only control what I can control, so for me, it wasn’t necessarily too much pressure,” the sprinter said.
“I looked at it from a perspective that everyone just believed that I could get it done, and that’s the support system, so for me, it was more like, these people have faith in me and I am the most experienced athlete out here, so I took that in a way that they believe in me, so why not believe in myself that I could get it done?” Greene added.
The sprinter is currently on a break but said his aim is to get an early start on preparations ahead of the new season scheduled to start in November.