PHILADELPHIA, USA — A top Penn Relays official has denied allegations of bias against Jamaican high schools teams taking part at the prestigious Penn Relays Carnival in Philadelphia, USA.

For years, a number of Jamaican high schools coaches and track and field fans have claimed biases against the Jamaican runners who have dominated the meet since 1964 — winning dozens of relays and individual titles, while competing against other Jamaican and American high schools.

The whispers reached a crescendo a few years ago when a number of coaches started talking about boycotting the meet and going elsewhere. This never gained momentum nor wide-range support and Jamaican teams are still going to the Penn Relays in record numbers. This year nearly 40 high school teams and six college teams are expected to take part.

The main bone of contention among the Jamaicans is that rules have been changed to ‘level the playing fields’, including limitations on the number of times that athletes can take part in the meet as well as whispers of the relay organisers subsidising teams from California to beat the Jamaicans.

Director of the meet, Dave Johnson, however, shot down these allegations during an interview with the Observer earlier this year.

Johnson, who was in the island earlier this year as a guest of the University of Technology, said it was ironic that the Jamaicans would level those charges as the same allegations were levelled at them by the New York-based schools whose decades-old dominance was broken by the Jamaicans.

Asked whether there were any truths that teams were being subsidised, Johnson said: “We can’t subsidise travel for no high school because that would be against NCAA rules and it would be seen as recruiting benefits.”

“The New York schools had dominated Penn Relays from the 1940s through to the early 1960s and they accused us of bringing in the Jamaicans to beat them; now the Jamaican have accused us of bringing in the California teams to beat them; the question is whose oxen is getting gored?” argued Johnson.

As for the eligibility rule changes, Johnson said the rules were always there, but it was the organisers who were lax in enforcing them. “That wasn’t done at all for the sake of levelling any playing field, that was a clarification of long existing rules,” he explained.

Johnson said the proliferation of the Internet and the easy access to meet results from anywhere in the world, made things a lot easier for the organisers to track the athletes and schools.

It was pointed out to Johnson that a number of Jamaicans had competed more than four years as were listed in the records section of the meet progra mme each year, including Catherine Scott who won watches between 1987-91, Claudine Williams (1990-94) as well as Aileen Bailey.

“That is a record that probably will never be broken and frankly should not have been allowed then, but this is what having computers can do as we can catch up on this,” he said.