TWO-TIME Olympic champion Veronica Campbell Brown is Jamaica’s most decorated track and field athlete, with gold medals at every level from the CARIFTA Games through the World Athletics levels of youth, junior and senior, racking up over 50 medals in the process.

The former Vere Technical standout has a glittering resume on the track as she was the second woman to win back-to-back Olympic 200m gold medals in Athens, Greece in 2004 and Beijing, China in 2008; 100m gold at the World Championships in Osaka, Japan in 2007, as well as consecutive gold medals in the Indoors World Championships in Doha, Qatar in 2010 and Istanbul, Turkey in 2012. .

The race that got away was the missed chance to win gold in the 100m final at the 2011 World Championships in Daegu, South Korea, she tells Jamaican media practitioner Tanya Lee in an interview posted on the YouTube platform.

Campbell Brown, whose senior career has spanned almost two decades since she won a silver medal on the Jamaican team at the 2000 Olympic Games in Sydney, Australia, as an 18 year-old school girl, said of the many races she wishes she could get to rerun, that 100m final in Daegu would be top of the list because it denied her the sprint double, as she won the 200m gold three days later.

“I have so many races that I would redo if I can, especially in the 100m…there are a lot of 100m races that I think I could have executed better, but I will choose the 2011 100m which Carmelita Jeter won,” she said.

Campbell Brown, who ran from lane eight, was one of three Jamaicans in the race, along with then Olympic Games 100m champion Shelly-Ann Fraser-Pryce, who finished fourth, her lowest placing in a World Championships final, and Kerron Stewart. Campbell Brown got off to a slow start and, despite a gallant charge, failed to catch the American.

“I think I was on pace to win that race but I messed up so badly at the start. I don’t like to make excuses, but when I think about that race I did not hear the gun too clearly [as] the starting system that was behind us was a weird one.

“They had speakers behind us but there was no speaker directly behind me, so I think I heard the echo of the gun and so I started slow…I made up a lot of ground [and] I almost caught up with Carmelita, but it was too late. So if I could redo that race I would, and hope to react a little better, faster and challenge her [Jeter] better – and then maybe the result would have been different,” noted the sprinter.

Campbell Brown, who had run her personal best 10.76 seconds (1.1m/s) in Ostrava three months before the World Championships, was second in Daegu with 10.97 seconds (-1.4m/s) behind Jeter’s 10.90 seconds, with Trinidad’s Kelly-Ann Baptiste third in 10.98 seconds.

— Paul Reid