SANTA CRUZ, St Elizabeth — Plans are well advanced for the further development of athletes to participate in the multi-events, the decathlon for males and heptathlon for females, says president of the Jamaica Athletics Administrative Association (JAAA) Garth Gayle.

With the return of national record holder Maurice Smith (8,644 points), World Championships silver medallist in 2007 in Osaka, Japan, and Olympic Games finalist in Beijing, China in 2008, Gayle thinks in two years the programme will start to bear fruit.

“Plans are going great for us to start paying more attention to the multi-events,” Gayle told the Jamaica Observer at Thursday’s staging of the COCAA/GraceKennedy Western Championships at STETHS Sports Complex in Santa Cruz.

“I recently had a meeting with Maurice Smith, one of our decorated decathletes, [who] is back home and will be setting up a programme with the full backing of the federation,” Gayle said.

“We are looking at starting at the youth level and even at the planned camp for the World Under-20 this summer, and we think that in another two years we should see more of our juniors being properly prepared for these events,” said the JAAA boss.

Recently the decathlon was introduced at the ISSA Boys’ and Girls’ Athletics Championships, replacing the heptathlon, with the females stepping up to the heptathlon after doing the pentathlon previously.

Jamaica has only been represented in the octathlon for boys and pentathlon for girls at the CARIFTA Games, with the most recent junior global junior representation coming in the heptathlon at the World Under 20 in Poland in 2008 when then national record holder Salcia Slack took part.

Gayle acknowledged that the only competition was at the ISSA championships and said it was the bigger, better-funded schools that had the benefit.

“We think that Maurice, with his eye for special talent, will unearth the talented youngsters that we have here,” he noted.

Currently there are four Jamaicans competing in the decathlon in the US college system — former Godfrey Stewart and Rhodes Hall High athlete Asani Hylton, former Calabar High’s Andrew Betton and Renaldo Savoury who are at Cloud County, as well as former Jamaican junior high jumper Romaine Beckford who is at South Plains Junior College.

Hylton, who is now at Stephen F Austin University, recently won the event at the Texas Relays with a new personal best score of 7,526 points which meamns he ranks 14th in the NCAA Division1.

Betton scored a new personal best 6,214 points on Friday to win the NJCAA Region VI Outdoor Championships at the Cowley sports complex in Arkansas City, Kansas, beating his previous best of 5543 points, while Savoury finished further down with 4425 points.

Betton had also won the NJCAA national indoors heptathlon with 4736 points.