THE gold medal performances of Usain Bolt and Shelly-Ann Fraser-Pryce at the just-concluded 14th IAAF World Championships in Moscow have done a lot to repair the damage to Jamaica’s image after three of the island’s top athletes returned adverse analytical findings in drug tests prior to the games.

That’s the view of David Riley of Technique Lab Limited and current head coach of Excelsior High School.

“The world wants Jamaica to do well, and I think they have done a great job in repairing it. I have not heard any talk about drugs and Jamaica in the same sentence, not even a slight comment, and I think there has been some amount of repair,” Riley pointed out at yesterday’s weekly Jamaica Observer Monday Exchange.

Jamaica and the world were rocked by news that Veronica Campbell Brown, Asafa Powell and Sherone Simpson returned positive tests just before the Championships. The revelation was made at the same time that American sprinter Tyson Gay also tested positive for a banned substance.

In the days leading to the Championships the news was dominated by stories about the findings, giving detractors of Jamaica’s athletics programme much fodder.

But at the Championships, Bolt, already dubbed a legend, underlined his dominance of the sprints, capturing the 100m and the 200m in 9.77 and 19.66 seconds, respectively, before anchoring Jamaica’s 4x100m relay to gold in 37.36 seconds.

Fraser-Pryce was just as impressive, winning the 100m by the widest of margins in a world-leading 10.71 seconds, stopping the clock at 22.17 seconds in the 200m to take gold and anchoring the 4x100m relay to a national record of 41.29 seconds.

Fraser-Pryce also made history by becoming the first Jamaican woman sprinter to win both the individual events and the 4x100m relay at a World Championships.

“I get the impression that the world likes Bolt,” said Riley. “The world wants to see Bolt do well. The world needs Bolt. The world let out a sigh of relief when they saw him go out there and do what the world wants him to do.

“Most people would want to see Jamaica do well. The world doesn’t want to see a Jamaica floundering and limping along in terms of track and field,” added Riley, who led Wolmer’s Boys’ School to victory at the annual Boys’ Championships in 2010.

Meanwhile, Dr Paul Auden, a former Jamaica Athletics Administrative Association executive who specialises in sports medicine, interjected that our sprinting success has brought the USA within striking distance of the other countries on the medals table.

“A lot of the countries that don’t know anything about sprints and are trying to compete with America, like Kenya, Ethiopia, Russia, and China, can compete against America on the global stage because we are taking care of the sprints and the relays,” explained Dr Auden.

“We are taking out America there, so everywhere you go they want us. A lot of Russians were wearing the black, green and gold of Jamaica. For the rest of the world, they see us as the country that can take on the mighty Americans.

“China and Russia are glad for us because they have no sprinters. Without us, America would top the medals table with gold,” Dr Auden reiterated.