‘A very rough time!’
JAMAICA’S Kevin Brooks covered himself with the Jamaican flag and with glory on Sunday after a gruelling two days in the Under-20 Boys’ octathlon at the 49th Carifta Games at National Stadium, winning the eight-discipline event with 4,942 points.
After enduring what he called the “hardest 1500m ever” he passed long-time leader Lynden Johnson of The Bahamas on the final event, who took second with 4,894, while Wooslyn Harvey of the Turks and Caicos Islands took the bronze medal with 4,888 points.
The 18-year-old Calabar High student was completing a “tough and difficult two weeks” after he was second in the decathlon a week earlier at the Inter-secondary Schools Sports Association (ISSA)/GraceKennedy Boys’ and Girls’ Athletics Championships.
“It’s a very rough time for me,” he told the Jamaica Observer minutes after collecting his gold medal, “but it’s a great feeling to win a gold at home for my country.”
The athlete, who said he started out as a sprinter, shared “but I had to learn to do all the events and there was a lot of training to get better”, revealing that the 1,500m which ends both events “is really hard; today was the hardest 1,500m that I had to do”.
Between the decathlon at Champs and the octathlon at Carifta, Brooks said he rested as,“over the past week between both championships it was just sleeping and resting”.
Brooks got off to a good start, running 11.18 seconds for the 100m, second best to Johnson’s 10.95 seconds, then jumped 6.20m in the long jump to slip to third overall as Croal Jelani won with 6.25m to take over the overall lead.
The Jamaican ended the first day in the lead with 2,839 points from four events, 111 points ahead of Johnson (2728 points) with Harvey in third with 2,695 points, just a point ahead of Jelani with 2,694.
The lead changed hands between Brooks, Johnson and Harvey before the final event when the Jamaican “suffered” through the 1,500m in 5:06.29 seconds, to get 524 points, enough to get past Johnson who was further back in 5:18.31 seconds while Harvey ran 5:15.96 seconds.
— Paul Reid
