We no longer saw track and field as an individual sport. We saw
it then and still see it today as a team sport.
Bruce James, President, MVP
They meet at 5 a.m. at the East Stadium, which sits beside the National Stadium like its little brother. This was the warm-up track – the ‘boiler room’, my American coaching friend called it – during Champs.
The first question is: why so early?
‘I do this’, Stephen Francis has explained, ‘to control the night-time activities of my athletes.’
By 7 a.m., the sun is creeping up from behind the Blue Mountains, casting long shadows across the faded red track and patchy grass of the infield. The light is pale gold. .
Sitting watching in the stand, it’s like observing a factory floor, with groups of workers performing highly specific tasks, watched over by the foreman, Francis. There are close to 100 athletes, all in little knots: a hive of activity and noise, the coaches’ whistles providing regular, jarring variations to the hum of the morning rush hour.
Francis is slumped on a bench in the infield wearing ill-fitting black tracksuit trousers, a green polo shirt and a sun hat. He has a black ‘man bag’ slung over his shoulder. The bench faces away from the track, but Francis has twisted his body – no mean feat, given his build – to be able to see the home straight. But as waves of athletes pass, sprinting or running with exaggerated knee-lifts, Coach Francis seems hardly to notice; he looks indifferent. Eventually he gets up and lumbers towards a group of four female sprinters gathered at the bend. Four other sprinters pass him and, without appearing to be watching them, he barks, ‘Shoulders, Shamira!’
A sprint hurdler is next down the straight and past the slow-moving Francis. ‘Trail leg!’ he shouts after her, again without turning.
But now he goes to wdrk, helping the female sprint teams prepare for the upcoming Penn Relays: a huge date in the Jamaican athletics calendar ever since Herb McKenley began taking teams there in the early 1960s. Today, in one of their final sessions before Pennsylvania, the baton changes are not as slick as they could be. ‘Reach!’ yells Francis after one sloppy change. After another failure, he stretches to full height with his hands in the air, then places them slowly behind his head in an attitude of pure exasperation. He raises his voice again: ‘Tell her to reach!’ When the men have similar problems, he seems to lose his temper: ‘What did I say? What did I say?’
Francis turns his attention to a young male sprinter. ‘Relax your shoulders, man . . . Let’s go, boy. Heels!’ Then, to a female sprint hurdler: ‘Lean forward! Forward . . . Forward . . . Forward! . . . Good, I like that.’
The track is full of sculpted, muscular bodies, now starting to overheat as the sun rises further in the sky. It’s still only 8 a.m., but Francis blows for a final time on his whistle, the activity abruptly ceases, and he wanders into the bowels of the stand. Soon he will make his way to the car park and his gleaming white BMW X5 to drive to his home in the surrounding hills, where he will read scientific papers or pore over data on his computer. Training will resume at 3 p.m. with a weights session in the gym at UTech.
The fifty-year-old Francis’s reputation precedes him. In reports his name is frequently prefixed with ‘controversial’, mainly because he seems to be permanently at war with the administrators: the Jamaica Athletics Administrative Association, the Jamaica Olympic Association, the government; pretty much anyone in authority. ‘We have never received one cent from any of them,’ he once complained. In interviews he comes across as blunt and outspoken but not rude or aggressive. In contrast to Glen Mills, with whom Francis has a strained relationship, at least he gives interviews.
Watching Francis with his athletes, blasting on his whistle and barking instructions, the impression is of a formidable, imposing and intimidating figure. Not somebody you would pick a fight with. Then again, perhaps his reputation owes too much, and unfairly, to his physique. He is a generously proportioned man. A 2009 article in the Australian newspaper The Age described him, a little unkindly, as ‘one of the unlikeliest sights in sport . . . A bear of a man who can barely manage a brisk walk, he spends his days bellowing through a megaphone at some of the fleetest athletes on the planet. They appear terrified of him.’
That was tame. In 2013, the Gleaner published a comment piece about Francis, under the headline ‘He ain’t pretty but he’s pretty damn good.’ It opened with some general observations on the relationship between a person’s looks and their popularity, in particular the unfortunate fate of the ‘ugly man’. It went on: ‘It can be argued that Stephen Francis, a genius of coaching and moulding athletic talent, does not get due respect and acknowledgement from the Jamaican public, perhaps because he’s not a pretty boy.’
The article continued: ‘“Frano” could hardly have been more unfortunate in the looks department. A corpulent man who makes the shade black look black,17 Francis knows what it takes to make athletes run pretty quickly with poise and beauty. Much of the reason for some people disliking him is the fact that he’s often brusque with the media and doesn’t indulge their prying into the business of him and his athletes.’
It ended with a plea for respect. It was an article in defence of Francis.
First impressions can be misleading. The day before my early-morning appointment at the East Stadium, I visited Dr Rachael Irving, a scientist at the University of the West Indies. From her office on the sprawling, well-maintained Mona campus we could just about see the pristine blue track where Mills and his Racers Track Club, including Bolt, train every morning.
Irving has been involved in a project to find the ‘speed gene’ that might explain the Jamaicans’ success, though originally she was more interested in the original trailblazers, Francis and his MVP club, than in Mills’s Racers Track Club. She was charged by scientist Yannis Pitsiladis with collecting DNA samples from some of the top athletes, including those at MVP.
She only knew Francis by reputation. ‘I was a little afraid. I went there to watch them training, the early mornings. I sat there in the stand for a month and just watched. Stephen came to me one morning and said, “Why are you here every day looking at us?”
‘I said, “Well I’m supposed to be involved in this project but I’m afraid to talk to you.”
‘Stephen said, “Why are you afraid of me?”’ She explained the project and Francis, to her surprise, was curious. He told her to phone him when he returned from a trip to Europe. She would do that, she said, adding that she already had his number. ‘That’s the number I give to people I don’t want to talk to,’ said Francis.
When it came to collecting the samples, Francis couldn’t have been more obliging. While Irving hovered with her swabs to collect saliva samples at the end of training, Francis ordered his athletes, including Asafa Powell and Shelly-Ann Fraser, to assist her. ‘Give Dr Irving some support!’ he barked if they showed any reluctance.
‘We developed, I wouldn’t say a friendship, but he’s somebody I can talk to,’ Irving told me. ‘He has a rough exterior. Well, persons say that, but they don’t know him. I think he’s fantastic!’
Beneath the stand, in the shade, the athletes file past, panting and sweating, in various states of distress. Francis, having stopped to speak to a couple of his assistants, watches them, offering words of encouragement or mild, tongue-in-cheek rebuke. The athletes include some of the best in the world: double Olympic 100 metres champion Shelly-Ann Fraser-Pryce; Nesta Carter, a double Olympic 4x100 metres gold medallist and 9.78-second 100 metres man; Shericka Williams, an Olympic relay medallist.
Francis looks relaxed. It might be a good time to approach. Can he spare some time? ‘Sure,’he says.
Like Glen Mills, Francis was not a star athlete as a schoolboy (another thing he has in common with Mills is that he is a bachelor. He explained in 2006: ‘In my twenties I was too much of a party person to marry. In my thirties I could not afford it. Now that I am in my forties I travel too much’).
‘I was a thrower at school,’ he tells me, ‘but not very good.’ He was a pupil at Wolmer’s Boys’ School (the first ever Champs winners, in 1910). He was more academically inclined, captaining the Schools’ Challenge Quiz team (a big deal in Jamaica: basically Champs for brainy kids). He went to the University of the West Indies in Kingston to do management studies, with accountancy and economics. Later he went to the US, to the University of Michigan, to do an MBA in finance. Bright, then.
While doing his undergraduate degree in Kingston, Francis began to take an interest in the athletic career of his younger brother, Paul, who was also at Wolmer’s, and a decent thrower. He volunteered to help coach at the school. ‘I got the coaching bug after a while,’ he says. ‘I went to the US to do my MBA, then returned and started coaching again part time at the school.’
Back in Kingston, he worked as a management consultant for KPMG. But it was increasingly coaching that consumed him. He would go and watch Dennis Johnson’s training sessions at UTech. A voracious reader, he devoured books on athletics and coaching. He was interested in the theoretical as well as the practical. (Which brings to mind a Ronald Reagan quote: ‘An economist is someone who sees something that works in practice and wonders if it would work in theory.’ Francis is an economist.)
‘You start first by reading books on track and field,’ he says, his voice so deep that you can almost feel the stand vibrating. He has a tendency to refer to himself in the second person. He says he read ‘Sprinting books, throwing books. Um, and then you realise you have to move to different areas: physiology, biomechanics, anatomy. To be a really knowledgeable coach you need to read a lot more than one would think necessary.’
Any key books? ‘A lot,’ Francis nods. ‘I think the most important book in my early career . . . I had a friend at Wolmer’s who went to study coaching in Cuba. He came back with a book about coaching that he said had all the secrets. But it was in Spanish.’ Which Francis didn’t speak. So how did he read it? ‘I sat down with a dictionary and a typewriter and translated it over a period of a month or so.’
It didn’t contain all the secrets, but it had some useful information on ‘the whole question of recovery; how they did periodisation; increasing [training] load. Those things were not as clear in most of the American textbooks I was reading at the time. You had other people like Frank Dick in Britain, who wrote some good books, and some American authors. A wide variety. Now a lot of the reading I do is research papers, research journals.’
It’s not all he reads. ‘I’m a very avid fan of novels. I read a lot of non-fiction, mainly legal, mystery-type theories. I do a lot of reading.’ As for favourite authors: ‘I like to think I discovered Michael Lewis,’ Francis says, ‘because I read his first [Liar’s Poker] in 1989.’ .
This is interesting, because Lewis’s books are concerned with the worlds of finance and money, or, as in the case of Moneyball and The Blindside, sport. There are differences between them, though. In his books about finance, he is concerned with exposing corruption, greed and nefarious practices; in his books about sport, he tends to be more interested in innovative coaches who discover and develop previously hidden, underrated or underperforming talent (the subtitle of Moneyball is: ‘The Art of Winning an Unfair Game’).
In fact, you could say that most of his books are essentially about people who beat or subvert the system: schemers. In the world of finance they tend to be malignant; in sport, benign. It could be a coincidence, of course. But there seems to be a moral distinction, one that maybe says more about Lewis’s cynicism towards the world of finance (a world he knows well having worked as a bond salesman) and his idealism when it comes to professional sport, with which he is perhaps not so intimately acquainted.
By the late 1990s, Francis had itchy feet. His job at KPMG paid well, but his passion was for athletics, or rather coaching. He believed that Jamaican athletes were being lost, slipping through the cracks in the system, although his main bone of contention was that there was no system in the first place. He felt that complacency reigned. (In the best tradition of those who see themselves as operating outside and against the system, he cannot resist digs at the Jamaican sporting establishment, even as he praises Champs as the island’s greatest institution: ‘Jamaica’s athletics success has always been about Champs. It was not designed by anybody, though the British have a lot to answer for. And so far Jamaicans have not been able to destroy it – but I think they’re working hard at that.’)
Jamaica’s problem was that they had always done so well: they consistently won more medals than an island their size had any right to expect. Francis believed that success bred complacency. There was a reluctance – a refusal – to think about how they could be even better.
Jamaica was a good nursery, but the finishing schools were in the US. As well as the home-grown, overseas-reared athletes, the success of other expats – including the Olympic 100 metres winners from 1988-96, Ben Johnson, Linford Christie and Donovan Bailey, even if the first two now have doping offences against their names – reinforced the idea that the existing model worked: teach kids how to run, then send them away.
Francis thought differently. He wondered if, in fact, talent was being lost. The research thing for me’, he explains, ‘was to compile a list of people from Jamaica and see what happened to them four years down the road compared to Americans, Kenyans, Australians . . . whatever. It was always something I discussed at various levels with the JAAA and with other coaches. At the time, everyone was very fearful of taking the step [of coaching Jamaican athletes at home], because it was all they knew: they run, they get a scholarship, and if you do hear from them again you get them to run for Jamaica as seniors. That was how it was.
‘DJ tried to change that up at UTech, but there was something missing when he was there in terms of connecting what he was doing at UTech to the top level of the sport.’
The frustration for Francis came in realising how many talented athletes had left for the US and then disappeared. ‘It was difficult to understand. I mean, I believed that a lot of the kids who didn’t make it in the States were either sidelined or there was maladjustment: missing their parents, missing their food, being stuck in the cornfields of Iowa, or the cornfields of Kansas, or being in the city and being caught up in the whole gangster and drugs stuff.’
There were advantages in the States in terms of facilities and regular competition. But not coaching – he believed they could be coached better in Jamaica, where their focus wouldn’t be running all over the US chasing points for their universities in the national colleges competition. Moreover, he adds, ‘I felt that if you could give them a relatively comfortable situation, the fact that they are where they’re accustomed to would more than make up for the deficiencies in proper weights facilities and so on. It would at least give them an equal chance. The problem was to get people to try it out.’
In September 1999, the Francis brothers and two friends, David Noel and Bruce James, who worked at Citibank, sat discussing the issue in James’s flat in Kingston. From this discussion they decided to start their own club. They called it Maximising Velocity and Power (MVP) Track and Field Club. At the same time Francis made a major decision: to quit his job and try coaching full-time. A radical, bold – or foolish – step. ‘Oh yeah,’ he says, ‘a big move. There were many ramifications. A lot of lifestyle changes and questioning as to whether it was a sensible thing to do.’
Presumably it meant a big drop in earnings, too. ‘Oh, huge, because up to that point nobody had made a living out of full-time coaching seniors in Jamaica. The only person at the time who’d made a living as a coach was the national football coach, who was a Brazilian.’ That was René Simões, who led the national team, known as the Reggae Boyz, to the 1998 World Cup finals in France.18
For the new MVP, the challenge was to recruit athletes. Was it a hard sell? It was a no sell,’ Francis says.
The first member was Brigitte Foster, a twenty-five-year-old sprint hurdler who had followed the familiar path. She had been a promising schoolgirl – though she never won at Champs – but had lost her way when she went to university in the US. In 1999, after four years away, she was back in Jamaica. As Bruce James explained in a TEDx talk in 2011 about the origins of MVP: ‘She was in search of a coach, and we were in search of an athlete.’
Francis began working with Foster, and within a year she was an Olympic finalist. She finished eighth in Sydney after hitting a hurdle, but the telling statistic was the improvement she made in twelve months, her time dropping from 13.30 for the 100 metres hurdles to 12.70. Foster said that what most impressed her about Francis was his ‘constant grasp for knowledge’.
Francis thought Foster’s performance in Sydney would put MVP on the map. Instead there was resistance at home to what they were trying to do. Bruce James believed that their vision, to coach senior Jamaican athletes in Jamaica, was actually unpopular with the powers-that-be: ‘We soon discovered that not everyone loved our idea. In fact, they didn’t even like it . . . the Jamaican power brokers thought, How dare these four men try to wreck a great thing that Jamaica has going on.’ He thought the ‘biggest hurdle was the Jamaican mindset. In Jamaica, Jamaicans were convinced that what we had achieved at the world championships and Olympics was so amazing it was remarkable. What were you going to change?’ (And indeed, why?)
In their first few years they trained on the dirt track at Wolmer’s. But the club began to struggle financially. Francis sold his car to keep MVP afloat. ‘My credit rating was so bad I could not get a credit card.’ Then he had an idea. He went to Johnson at UTech with an offer: he would coach their athletes for free (he was by now an IAAF-accredited coach) if MVP could use their facilities. He thus became Johnson’s unpaid assistant. And now, well over a decade later, the partnership between university and club is, says Francis, ‘hugely symbiotic. Most athletes who come to UTech know they’ll be in MVP. It’s almost like it’s one; we are known as UTech/MVP. We share everything.’
The founding principles of the club they discussed in James’s flat in 1999 remain paramount, however. James, in his talk in 2011, called them the ‘three philosophies’ of MVP:
1. We no longer saw track and field as an individual sport. We saw it then and still see it today as a team sport.
2. The option to stay and train in Jamaica is just that: an option. But it is critical to have this option.
3. Confidence. A Jamaican national hero, Marcus Garvey, said: ‘If you haven’t confidence in self, you are twice defeated in the race of life. With confidence, you have won even before you have started.’19
When they were getting started, says Francis, ‘we were just looking for people we could get. There were some who I coached at Wolmer’s. They would be more likely to believe in me and say, “OK, we’ll give Coach a chance.” The majority of the time we had to look for people who the coaches in the States were not going to be pursuing.’
Francis was also setting out to coach adults rather than kids. This posed a new challenge and required a different approach. Schoolchildren would, he explains, ‘finish training in May and come back in September taller, stronger, faster, without you doing anything. As long as the youngster grows you don’t have to pay too much attention to technique or anything like that because their body’s natural progression . . . is ensuring that some kind of improvement occurs.
‘When, at eighteen, nineteen, the growth slows – or for females when they’re sixteen, seventeen – then it becomes a lot more difficult for them to improve. You no longer get the physical help from their bodies. For them to [improve] you need to ensure they do the right kind of work. So it’s vastly more difficult – it’s part of the reason why there is such a very low transfer rate in terms of talent as juniors to success as seniors.’
Francis, in any case, was not looking for the best high school athletes, mainly because he didn’t think they’d be interested. ‘At first we didn’t dare approach anybody who people thought was good. With Asafa we directly picked him out because he came last. He looked OK but we knew there’d be little or no competition to get him.’
Asafa Powell was eighteen when he joined MVP. He had grown up in Linstead, in St Catherine Parish, twelve miles inland from Spanish Town. He went to Charlemont High, not a leading force at Champs -often they didn’t even qualify.20
At Champs in 2000, Powell was third in the first round of the 100 metres in 11.45 and fourth in his 200 metres in 23.07; he didn’t progress beyond the heats. A year later he reached the 100 metres final, after running 10.77 in the semi, but false-started. The race was won by Marvin Anderson of St Jago in 10.40, ahead of another redhot talent, Steve Mullings.
Francis didn’t see Powell’s talent (nobody did), but he did see his potential. His technique was so ragged – ‘I used to lean way back,’ Powell has said. ‘My arms weren’t going up; my knees were going too high; everything was wrong’ – that Francis believed improvements were possible in every department. To be fair, few would have disputed that.
Something that counted in Powell’s favour, perhaps, was that he hadn’t been through the kind of regime that athletes at schools such as Calabar and Kingston College were exposed to. Francis might also have imagined there was something in his genes. He was the youngest of six boys (of course) born to William and Cislyn Powell, both pastors in the Redemption National Church of God. His parents had been decent sprinters in their youth, his father running 10.2 seconds for the 100 yards, his mother 11.4, but the talent seemed to have passed to another of their sons, Donovan, who was eleven years Asafa’s senior. Donovan’s personal best for 100 metres was 10.07, in 1995, but he is even better known in Jamaica for inflicting the only defeat in four years on Calabar’s Daniel England at Champs, in the 200 metres in 1990. Donovan Powell attended one of the sprinting powerhouses, St Jago (where Yohan Blake went to school). He also had a positive drugs test against his name, for ephedrine (a stimulant common in cold treatments) in 1995.
Asafa began working with Francis a week after Champs in 2001. The improvement was immediate. Three months later, on 22 June, he won the national under-20 100 metres in a personal best, 10.50 seconds. The next year he represented Jamaica at the Commonwealth Games in Manchester. He didn’t make the final but did record another personal best, 10.26, in finishing fifth in the semi-final. In the relay, with Powell running the anchor leg, Jamaica took a silver medal behind England.
In the same year, the Powell family suffered the first of two tragedies. Asafa’s brother Michael was shot dead by a mugger as he sat in a New York taxi. The next year, another of his brothers, Vaughn, dropped dead while playing American football. A heart attack was the verdict. Powell suffered a loss of confidence. ‘I started to wonder,’ he said, ‘“Who’s next?”’
But he carried on running, and training with Francis, and improving, becoming Jamaican national senior champion in 2003. A year later, he went below 10 seconds for the first time, running 9.99 seconds on G. C. Foster’s threadbare track. Then he defended his national title with a sparkling 9.91 at the National Stadium: one of nine sub-10-second runs he recorded that season.
He was on his way.
Francis and MVP were on their way too. With Brigitte Foster winning a silver medal at the 2003 world championships, their reputation was burgeoning, even if some local resistance remained. At least now they didn’t have to chase second-tier athletes. ‘Eventually it became an option for athletes who people thought were good,’ Francis says.
And people were paying attention, because Francis was asked to coach one of the island’s brightest young prospects. He was from rural Trelawny, on the other side of the island, and his name was Usain Bolt. ‘I was asked to coach Usain in 2003. But, well, I was told he was an extremely hard worker and I felt that most of his success at the time was due to the fact that he was training hard.’
In something of a mumble, Francis adds: ‘Which was inaccurate.’
So he is the coach who turned down Bolt – though he insists he has no regrets. ‘I wasn’t put offby this,’ he adds, referring to his belief that Bolt could be one of those athletes who peaked in his teens. ‘What I was put off about, really, was the amount of people who were trying to claim a piece of him.’ There was a growing entourage – Bolt’s sponsors, Puma; his manager, Norman Peart; a European agent, Ricky Simms. ‘I told the Puma people, “Look, if I’m going to coach Usain, most of these people are not going to have any influence, so it might not be a good thing,”’ Francis says. He told them who he did and didn’t want to be involved. But it was the constellation forming around him that he really found off-putting. ‘I have never been a person who gravitates to an athlete because he is the best. It’s more of a challenge to me to look at those people who others are ambivalent about, or who they don’t think are any good.’
As per one of the MVP philosophies, he also believes in the idea of creating a team without major stars who stand head and shoulders above the others. It is all part, he says, of fostering a culture in which people are motivated – indeed, compelled – to improve. Almost anybody who commits to his programme will improve, he states, ‘unless they are really, really, really, really bad’. Moreover, he adds, ‘It is hard not to commit, because right now we have almost like a treadmill going downhill. Once you get on it, it’s hard to stop because the whole environment, the whole culture, forces you to fit in.’
What he looks for, says Francis, ‘are people who, based on their trend so far, look like they have some sort of upside. They’ve not been killed in high school; there’s still something there to be got out. We try to work with them. To me it’s a much better feeling taking an also-ran to the top.’
On the eve of the 2004 Olympic Games – the second of MVP’s existence – that is where the club’s flag-bearer was. Asafa Powell ran in a star-studded 100 metres at the Weltklasse in Zurich, part of the IAAF’s Golden League and traditionally the most prestigious meeting on the circuit. Olympic champion Maurice Greene was there, as was world champion Kim Collins and a young American prospect, Justin Gatlin. The tall figure of Powell (he is six foot three) was in the lane alongside Greene, and these two emerged at the front, Greene drifting towards Powell, emphasising that they were locked in battle. Their arms brushed but Powell didn’t flinch; he remained focused on the line to win in 9.93, a hundredth of a second ahead of Greene, with Gatlin a distant third.
It was no longer a surprise. Powell was now being talked about in the same breath as Greene, Gatlin and Collins. With every passing race, Francis and MVP were demonstrating that they could produce world-class athletes at home in Jamaica. In Powell, they had the favourite for the blue riband event at the Olympic Games in Athens, the men’s 100 metres. They were close to reaching their Everest; they could look up and see the summit.
17 The remark about Francis’s colour provoked some angry responses in the Gleaner but it hints at an enduring preoccupation with the colour, or shade, of someone’s skin, and some of the complex, contradictory attitudes surrounding this issue in Jamaica: attitudes exemplified by the dancehall star, Vybz Kartel. In 2011 he bleached his skin and launched a range of skin-bleaching products even while singing that black people should be proud of their colour. During my first visit to Jamaica the news was dominated by Kartel’s conviction for murder; he was sentenced to thirty-five years in prison.
18 Dennis Johnson was absolutely scathing of the Reggae Boyz. ‘The Reggae Boyz!’ he spluttered. ‘The Reggae Boyz was born to lose. When countries go to the World Cup, them eyes on the prize! You know what we went to do? Get on to the field of play!’ Johnson overlooks the fact that Jamaica became the smallest nation ever to win a World Cup Game, beating Japan 2~1 in their final group match. The Reggae Boyz might not have been in France thinking they could win the tournament, but they were hardly Cool Runnings.
19 Garvey (1887-1940) was a political leader, skilled orator and hero to the Rastafari movement, who consider him a prophet. Ironically, given MVP’s mission to encourage Jamaican athletes to stay in Jamaica, Garvey was the founder of the Black Star Line, which promoted the return of the African diaspora to their ancestral lands. A people without the knowledge of their past history, origin and culture is like a tree without roots,’ he said.
20 Powell might be one of Charlemont High’s most famous alumni, and was for a while arguably the most popular man in Jamaica, but his popularity had its limits. A proposal in 2010 to change the name of his former school to the Asafa Powell High School, which seemed to be led by the Asafa Powell Foundation, was opposed by other ex-pupils, and over 800 objections were reportedly posted on Facebook.