Jamaican athletes urged to step up at next year’s Olympics

YOKOHAMA, Japan: Jamaica’s Shelly-Ann Fraser-Pryce has called on the country’s track athletes to step up at next year’s Tokyo Olympics — the first since sprint king Usain Bolt hung up his spikes.

The two-time Olympic 100m champ, competing at this weekend’s world relays in Yokohama after returning from maternity leave, predicted a bright future for Jamaican sprinting after Bolt bowed out in 2017 with eight Olympic gold medals and 11 world titles.

Jamaica’s male sprinters struggled at last year’s Commonwealth Games, where Yohan Blake trailed in third in the 100 metres and the men’s 4x100m relay team settled for bronze behind England and South Africa. Trinidad and Tobago’s Michelle-Lee Ahye also pipped Jamaica’s Christania Williams to gold in the women’s 100m on the Gold Coast, while England beat the Jamaicans in the 4x100m. But Fraser-Pryce, who captured back-to-back 100m Olympic titles at the 2008 Beijing and 2012 London Games, backed her fellow Jamaicans to hit back in the run-up to the 2020 Tokyo Games.

Fraser-Pryce, whose bid for an Olympic 100m hat-trick ended in bronze at the 2016 Rio Olympics, admits to sleepless nights being away from her baby son Zyon, born in August 2017.