Those who go to Champs, the annual Inter-Secondary Schools Association (ISSA) Boys and Girls Championships, often may have come to expect the excitement it brings. Each year since Boys Champs started in 1910, the island’s best student-athletes do battle in running, jumping and throwing events in the hope of preserving the honour of their schools. In response, the nation watches as keenly as if it were the Olympic Games.
That comparison was once made by Munro Champs hero, retired English top division football star and broadcaster Lindy Delaphena, who called Boys Championships a mini-Olympics. That was long before Boys Champs and Girls Champs merged in 1999 to form a truly super event. Now it truly has an Olympic feel about it.
The atmosphere on Champs Saturday, when only finals are contested, is absorbing. Colours and sounds literally explode out of the National Stadium and the demand for seats has long outgrown the 30,000 capacity of a building opened in 1962.
In that cauldron, student-athletes as young as 11 make their first steps to possible Olympic glory and academic advancement. Jamaica’s Olympic champions, from Arthur Wint to Usain Bolt and Shelly-Ann Fraser Pryce, cut their athletic teeth at Champs.
It’s pretty simple. If the debutant can survive the pressure of 30,000 eyes and many more watching on TV, then they can survive the Olympics. That truism isn’t always true. Many Champs stars fall by the wayside but Wint, Donald Quarrie, Veronica Campbell-Brown, Melaine Walker, Deon Hemmings, Fraser Pryce and Bolt all performed for their respective schools at the mini-Olympics Delaphena spoke about.
So did World Champions Bert Cameron, Merlene Ottey, Trecia-Kaye Smith, Yohan Blake, Michelle Freeman and Juliet Campbell. World Junior champions Gillian Russell, Dexter Lee, Kaliese Spencer, Janieve Russell, Jaheel Hyde and Nikole Mitchell have also been there and done that. In these cases, Champs seasoned them for their athletic destinies.
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