Jamaican sports fans, like their peers in much of the rest of the world, seem to enjoy playing favourites and claiming who is the greatest among the sports stars — the preponderance of riches in track and field sprints, arguably, gives Jamaicans licence so to do.

Such a debate appears to have been set off by the declaration of a British commentator at the current World Championships in Oregon, United States, that Jamaica’s Mrs Shelly-Ann Fraser-Pryce is the “greatest sprinter of all times”, female or male, which includes Mr Usain Bolt, her compatriot.

The commentator may be forgiven if he had been carried away by the scintillating run by Mrs Fraser-Pryce in Sunday’s 100-metre women’s final, in which she won a fifth World Championships gold, running one of her fastest times ever, at age 35, as part of a Jamaican clean sweep of the medals on offer.

He made a concession to Mr Bolt by saying the Jamaican great transcended sports, which begs for definition of what makes one the greatest sprinter of all time, and which the commentator did not have enough time to break down for his worldwide audience.

In our Monday edition, the Jamaica Observer skipped over the pothole of saying Mrs Fraser-Pryce is the greatest of all time, opting to say she is the greatest female sprinter of all time which, we suspect, can hardly be contested on the numbers.

There, of course, is the rub, if we may borrow from William Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Surely if we are going to enter into a debate or argument about something which has not yet been objectively proven and accepted as such we have to go beyond treating an opinion as fact.

Some Jamaicans will be quite satisfied to accept the British commentator’s opinion — anything foreign must be superior to local. However, because the two world superstars named are Jamaican, we should want to look at the criteria and crunch the numbers to support them, in order to arrive at a reasonable conclusion.

Beyond the numbers, there will be great difficulty comparing women with men in track and field because of the natural difference in strength, muscle mass and hormonal share. Isn’t that why World Athletics doesn’t want to run women with higher than normal testosterone against other women?

Moreover, after comparing their achievements in the 100 metres, Mr Bolt, in addition, has done superlatively at the 200 metres, which he says is his pet event and which is not Mrs Fraser-Pryce’s.

Throw into that the number of world records made and broken and one begins to see the real need for sensible discussion, wider research and deeper analysis, which, regrettably can’t be done in today’s limited column space and is probably better left to the real aficionados.

One thing we can say without fear of credible contradiction is that Jamaica has produced in Mrs Fraser-Pryce and Mr Bolt the two greatest sprinters of all times in their genders. That may be satisfying enough.

We think Mr Bolt was wise to not go down the road with the commentator but stuck to hailing the women.

In the meantime, let us continue to savour that sparklingly clean sweep by the effervescent Mrs Fraser-Pryce, Ms Shericka Jackson and Mrs Elaine Thompson-Herah, while we empathise with Mr Hansle Parchment for that freak accident which took him out of the 110-metre hurdles in which he looked set to medal.