Jamaica’s prowess in global athletics is no fluke . . . or, as some would
wish to convince the world, the result of officially blessed and systematic
cheating . . . That dominance rests on natural talent, a tradition of
excellence that has its roots in more than a century of Champs and the
return on investment more than three decades ago in establishing the
G. C. Foster College for Physical Education and Sports.
Editorial in the Jamaica Gleaner, 2 April 2014
If Dennis Johnson did more than any other individual to take sprint coaching around the country, and Herb McKenley developed a culture of excellence at one school, it needed something else, an institution, to bolster, spread and sustain their work.
Heading out of Calabar High School, turriing right on to busy Washington Boulevard, takes you in the direction of Spanish Town. And when, after half an hour, you reach Spanish Town, you find G. C. Foster College.
Or you try to find it. It isn’t easy. It’s actually in the north of Spanish Town, in the Angels district. The college sits in expansive grounds, but these grounds are hidden on the other side of a railway line, in the middle of a community that resembles a shanty town: houses and shops constructed from wood and old bits of metal. You get lost in a maze of small, bumpy streets, until, about to give up, you abruptly emerge into open space, with plains and sports fields stretching out in front of you.
‘It’s in a terrible place,’ I was told by Hugh Small, a judge and former politician who served as youth sports minister. ‘It’s not what it was or what it could be. But it needed a significant amount of land and the only available land was in Spanish Town.’
Small was one of the politicians who in the late 1970s worked on the plans to establish a sports college in Jamaica modelled on the centres of excellence that existed in Cuba, East Germany and the Soviet Union; centres integral to the systems that brought these countries phenomenal success at the Olympic Games. It was no coincidence that inspiration came from behind the Iron Curtain.
Jamaica in the seventies had a socialist government, led by the charismatic five-times-married Michael Manley of the PNP, the People’s National Party. Manley forged a relationship with Fidel Castro’s Cuba that alarmed the US, who feared the spread of communism so close to their shores. As a consequence, the CIA increasingly involved themselves in Jamaican politics, backing the rival right-leaning Jamaica Labour Party (JLP), led by the reggae-loving Edward Seaga (also a record company owner who contributed much to the burgeoning music scene). Less than two decades after gaining independence, the island was becoming bitterly split along party lines. Communities in Kingston were turned into garrisons affiliated to one political party or the other; guns began flooding into the country; gangs were allegedly armed by politicians.14 The violence kept escalating even as Bob Marley, living in exile in London after being shot in his home on Hope Road in 1976, put Jamaica on the world stage with his songs about love and peace.
Marley’s One Love Peace Concert at the National Stadium in 1978 was intended to signal his return to Jamaica and put an end to the violence. At one point he called the two political rivals on to the stage to stand alongside him, joining their hands above his head, the politicians stern-faced and awkward as they towered over the diminutive singer. ‘We gotta be together,’ said Marley. ‘I just want to shake hands and show the people that we’re gonna make it right, we’re gonna unite, we’re gonna make it right, we’ve got to unite . . .’ (It didn’t have the desired effect: in 1980, when Seaga replaced Manley in a bitter election, 800 people were murdered in the course of the campaign. The violence was shocking. But it has since got worse: there are around 1,500 gun deaths a year in Jamaica, almost a fifth at the hands of the authorities: in 2013,258 people were shot dead by police, though, encouragingly, it was closer to 100 in 2014.)15
The Manley name is synonymous with Jamaican politics. Michael Manley’s father, Norman, who founded the PNP, was hailed in 1962 as one of the founding fathers of independence. It seems more than a coincidence that he was also one of Jamaica’s first world-class sprinters, whose national 110 yards record of 10 seconds flat, set at Champs in 1911, stood for forty-one years. Later, as a barrister, he represented future Olympic champion Arthur Wint when the young Wint was on trial after accidentally shooting and killing his female colleague. Yet Norman Manley, having fought so hard for Jamaican independence, never served as prime minister. His cousin, Alexander Bustamante, who set up the rival JLP, was the country’s first elected leader, serving from 1962 to 1967. Manley’s son, Michael, was then elected in 1972.
Michael Manley was inspired by the strong emphasis Cuba put on sport, with athletes identified at a young age – a Junior Olympic Programme was established in Cuba in 1963 – and given specialist coaching. Results followed. By the seventies, Castro’s Cuba was an Olympic powerhouse.
Hugh Small told me that in the late 1970s, when he was Jamaica’s youth sports minister, he visited Cuba to inspect their then state-of-the-art sports facilities. He also travelled to East Germany and the Soviet Union, and to one non-communist country: Great Britain. 1 went to Loughborough,’ he recalled. ‘I met Seb Coe and his father, Peter.’
Even back then Jamaica already had a disproportionate number of world-class runners: after McKenley, Wint and Rhoden came George Kerr, a double Olympic bronze medallist in 1960, Lennox Miller, an Olympic 100 metres medallist in 1968 and 1972, and Don Quarrie, the 1976 Olympic 200 metres champion. But Manley wanted to establish a system, open to rich and poor, but especially poor, to put Jamaica on a par with other small nations – Cuba and East Germany being the obvious examples – that didn’t just punch above their weight but were sporting superpowers.
P. J. Patterson, the foreign minister in Manley’s government, recalls a visit by Castro. ‘Fidel offered six schools,’ Patterson told me. ‘Michael said he wanted one for people to be trained in physical education. That became the G. C. Foster College, and out of it has come a flow of coaches.’
You enter its grounds and drive past a disused Olympic-sized swimming pool and diving pool. Both are fading white edifices, dry as a bone, with weeds sprouting through the cracks. The sports fields are large, but they too seem neglected. The buildings that make up the campus look as though they were built in 1980 and have barely been touched since. A large sign at the entrance, with a picture of a smiling Gerald Claude Eugene Foster, offers some historical background. The first sports college in the English-speaking Caribbean opened in September 1980, ‘the original buildings and equipments [. . .] gifts from the government and people of Cuba to the government and people of Jamaica’.
Foster, after whom the college is named, is another major figure in Jamaican sport. Dennis Johnson mentioned him as the only coach, apart from Herb McKenley, worthy of the name when he returned to the island in 1966. He was an old man then; he died that same year, aged eighty.
Foster is best known for his efforts to compete at the 1908 London Olympics, crossing the Atlantic in a banana boat only to be denied the opportunity because Jamaica, as a British colony, was not a member of the IOC in its own right. Foster remained in England and took part in post-Games meetings, where he showed his talent, beating some of the sprinters who had excelled at the Olympics. He had attended Wolmer’s Boys’ School – still a powerful force at Champs – and was marked out as a gifted athlete when, as a fourteen-year-old, he was given a ten-yard handicap against Kingston’s best sprinter, M. L. Ford. He won by three yards. When he was eighteen, he ran 100 yards in 10 seconds: comparable with Archie Hahm’s 11 seconds over 100 metres to win the Olympic title in the same year, 1904.
While I was in Jamaica, staying in Bull Bay, I mentioned that I was researching a book on athletics and was asked if I had heard of G. C. Foster. ‘His daughter lives two doors down,’ I was told. Pat Lightburn was her name, and she was eighty-eight and frail, living in a small, rundown house by the beach, surrounded by family – four generations at least, with a not untypical mix of ethnic influences, from the paleskinned Mrs Lightburn to her black great-granddaughter.
Here was a living link to the original roots of Jamaica’s sprinting culture. It was quite mind-blowing, especially to realise that it was almost fifty years since G. C. Foster had died. His daughter recalled him as vividly as she could: as an energetic, enthusiastic and relentlessly positive man who poured all his energy into sport. He was also a first-class cricketer before becoming an athletics coach, but he coached everything – she remembered him firing the starting pistol at the cycling track at the National Stadium to cries of ‘Let them go, Mr Foster! Let them go!’ She added: ‘He coached at every school at one time or another, and they all won Champs when he coached them.’ Indeed, he led Calabar to their first Champs title in 1931, then took Jamaica to the island’s first international games, the 1935 British Empire Games in Hamilton, Canada, and to the 1948 London Olympics.
At the entrance to the college posthumously named after Foster, I am met by Maurice Wilson, the head coach, who takes me on a tour, pointing out, beyond the running track, a curious structure that looks like a funfair ride made out of Meccano. ‘Cool Runnings,’ he says. This was where the Jamaican bobsleigh team trained for the 2014 Winter Olympics.
Wilson tells me that he has been head coach at G. C. Foster for eleven years. But like so many other coaches in Jamaica, his responsibilities range from schoolchildren to the best in the world. He is technical director of the country’s governing body, the JAAA, and acted as head coach at the 2002 Commonwealth Games in Manchester, then again at the 2014 Games in Glasgow, having done the same job at the 2011 senior world championships in Daegu, South Korea. At G. C. Foster he is also principal lecturer in sports and recreation. ‘But I’m a specialist track and field lecturer,’ he adds.
Wilson talks the way an athlete limbers up, stretching his vocabulary. ‘The persons who come under my guidance are versed in the major disciplines of track and field,’ he explains when we are in his office. ‘They must be able to coach to a level, and to pass on the information to other coaches.’ His office is next to a classroom in which the students are becoming rowdy. ‘I need to talk to them,’ he says, and disappears, then quickly reappears, closing the door. ‘My job is to make sure they become experts in the different disciplines; they are then distributed and dispersed all across the island to spread the philosophy of G. C. Foster. So it filters through the system.’
How would he sum up that philosophy? ‘The basic techniques, the basic training methods, are given to these youngsters early. This is why you’re seeing these performances. We do not leave, for example, technique, and mobility, and coordination, just to be learned. We help to correct deficiencies, and so on. This is done at an early stage. This is why Jamaicans are able to pass a baton without even having a training camp. It’s drilled into them; from primary school.’
He echoes Dennis Johnson when he says that as far as he’s concerned, it’s all about technique. Not that Jamaicans know how to sprint while the rest of the world does not, but that the correct techniques are so ingrained because they are taught so early.
I was struck at Champs by the fact that the schools all had coaches who were, clearly, coaches, as opposed to teachers performing extracurricular duties. It is difficult to explain why this was obvious; it just was, from their uniform – baseball cap, polo shirt, stopwatch, whistle – to the way they carried themselves, to the deference shown by their student athletes. The coaches took what they did – and by extension their athletes, and themselves – seriously Wilson says that all of them will have passed through G. C. Foster; indeed, it is now a requirement of the secondary schools’ association that organises Champs that school coaches must have a G. C. Foster qualification.
The college doesn’t just churn out coaches. It produces people with other sports-related qualifications: sports masseurs, for example. Usain Bolt’s personal masseur, Everald Edwards, trained at G. C. Foster. So did Shawn Kettle, who works for Yohan Blake, and Patrick Watson, a long-time member of Asafa Powell’s team.
Wilson himself was a 400 metres runner at school, but, like Glen Mills and Stephen Francis, he was not an exceptional athlete. He excelled academically; he has a masters degree in science, as well as an undergraduate degree and a teaching diploma. This is another feature of quite a few of the top coaches: they are highly educated. Wilson believes that as well as being good athletes, his countrymen have a flair for coaching: ‘I think we’re naturally good coaches. Like Englishmen are good bankers . . . or seafarers.’
Where does it come from, this aptitude for coaching? ‘I think although sometimes we don’t pay attention to detail, anything that intrigues us we do well at. And running is a national obsession.’
On a tour of the grounds, Wilson laments the state of the running track and hopes a new one can be installed soon. He seems apologetic or embarrassed by the non-pristine condition of the place, and doesn’t lead me anywhere near the swimming pool. But even if the infrastructure is crumbling, the wide-open space is invigorating. And compared to the facilities at Calabar, this is state-of-the-art.
We arrive at the office of the principal, Edward Shakes. He too speaks slowly, deliberately, in similar velvety tones; but initially, and at some length, about British football. I’m a Man U fan,’ he says sombrely. ‘Me, Chelsea,’ offers Wilson, who sits in the corner of the principal’s office and inspects his phone.
Shakes’s background is in engineering – he studied in Britain for a while. ‘I didn’t come here as an expert in sport,’ he says, ‘I came in as an education administrator.’ There are around 500 students at G. C. Foster, slightly more men than women. All will leave as certified coaches, and in many cases, as qualified teachers too.
‘Prior to the college, there were only a few schools who performed very well and most of the outstanding athletes came from those few schools,’ Shakes explains. ‘Kingston College, Calabar and so on. But with the advent of G. C. Foster College, we train and disperse persons right across the country. We have trained persons placed in the schools in very rural areas. So someone like Usain Bolt, for example, who comes from rural Trelawny, he would have been exposed to a G. C. Foster coach at a very young age, and it would have been that person who discovered his talent and gave him all the early grooming.’
Shakes acknowledges the benefits of having an international coach on his staff – one of Wilson’s athletes, Rasheed Dwyer, would go on to be crowned Commonwealth 200 metres champion in 2014, winning ahead of Warren Weir. Wilson is a Level VIAAF coach: the highest qualification. ‘When you have that combination – someone like Maurice who is an academic as well as an internationally qualified coach, and a practising coach – you ensure your standards remain relevant. We have other international coaches on staff. We try to maintain standards. And they are practising what they teach.’
In a sense, the college has achieved what it set out to do, training coaches to a high standard and, as both Shakes and Wilson say, dispersing them around the country, like seeds blowing off a dandelion. Naturally it took a few years for these seeds to find fertile ground and flower; then a little longer for the athletes to progress through the schools system and emerge on the international stage. But it certainly happened. And now the challenge, for Shakes, is maintaining standards, keeping G. C. Foster College fit for purpose – not letting the Jamaican system, of which the college is such an integral part, decline as the Cuban one has.
Shakes mentions the swimming pool, describing it as ‘one of two big projects’, along with the athletics track, requiring attention. He says he wants to ‘resuscitate our pool. One point I was making was that we have the opportunity to do in swimming what we have done in track and field.’16
I ask when the pool was last used. Shakes sighs deeply. ‘Interesting story. It was built by the Cubans. But as happened in the UK, governments change. And in 1980, the socialist government in Jamaica was voted out and a more conservative government was voted in on an anti-communist, anti-Cuba platform.
‘So immediately after the election, the new prime minister [Seaga] ordered the Cuban technicians that were here to go home. And so, although the pool was built, it was never commissioned.’
‘You mean it’s never been used?’
‘No. It was well built. And now, refurbishing it and getting it going is what we want to do.’
The Cuban technicians were just days away from completing their work. Could Seaga not have let them stay to get it finished? ‘In the Cold War, a lot of crazy things happened, you know,’ Shakes says. There was considerable pressure on Seaga from the US, he adds. ‘If you wanted their money . . .’ So it was American money or a swimming pool? ‘I wouldn’t put it that way, but the government acted because of pressure from the US.’
*
‘Irrespective of what you may think of Jamaica, you have to come here to see,’ Maurice Wilson tells me after we have left the principal’s office. ‘We have many more Usain Bolts. It is not a fad. It is something that is ingrained in us. You have to be at boys’ and girls’ Champs to understand it.’
I tell Wilson that it’s all very well me reporting back on Champs, and the extraordinary performances I witnessed, but many have made up their minds – that the explanation for Jamaica’s success is drugs.
‘Let me say something on thkt,’ he replies. ‘When you look at the drugs that was involved [in recent cases], let us be reasonable. When you talk about a stimulant, that has no effect on you during competition . . . yes, you have violated a rule, but why make it appear as if those guys are on steroids? There is no distinction made!’
Wilson, like Dennis Johnson and others involved in the sport in Jamaica, is frustrated at the perception that their athletes are systematically cheating. He does not think the transgressions are the ‘tip of the iceberg’, as one Jamaican drug-tester has claimed. ‘We have never had a top-notch athlete coming out of Jamaica that has tested positive for a hard drug, like steroids, where you know that they definitely went out there to cheat,’ Wilson says. ‘And I know that a lot of times people throw cold water on performances. In other words, “I cannot believe that in a population of three million these guys are topping the world.” But I do believe that Scottish people are great bankers . . . I do believe that the Irish do well in business. So how is it that you cannot believe we are great athletes?’
Perhaps it was a natural evolution from G. C. Foster’s production of so many home-grown coaches to have home-grown stars too. ‘It was Stephen Francis’, Wilson says, ‘who decided, after Carl Lewis made a statement that they [the US] were training our athletes, that the job could be done here.’
14 Almost inevitably, a culture developed where local ‘dons’, like Christopher ‘Dudus’ Coke, became all-powerful in the garrisons. As Mark Shields, a British police officer seconded to Jamaica in 2004, told the Guardian in 2012: ‘It’s criminal terrorism. People literally live in fear. If they run a shop, they have to pay protection. If the don wanted their youngest daughter, they would have to give her up so he could take her virginity. The community was completely under the control of the local don, and the police were deeply frightened about going in there.’
15 According to Laurie Gunst in Born Fi’Dead, her disturbing and controversial 1996 book about gang culture in Jamaica: ‘The politicians and their gunmen took over where the slave masters and their overseers left off: the practice of intimidation was a logical outgrowth of the brutal intimacy that had always prevailed between the powerful and the powerless.’
16 Why not? In December 2014, a Jamaican, Alia Atkinson, became the first black woman ever to win a world swimming title, at the world short-course championships in Doha. Atkinson won the 100 metres breaststroke. She trains in Florida.