Despite making her name in the 400m hurdles during her time in high school and for the first few years of her professional career, Shiann Salmon says she has not decided whether she will contest the intermediate hurdles or compete in the ‘flat’ 400m this season.

The former Hydel High school standout returned home last year after being based in the United States for the better part of five years and is now under the guidance of Maurice Wilson at the GC Foster College-based SprinTec Track Club. She told the
Jamaica Observer that they were still in the process of making a decision concerning her main event this season.

“We have not decided [whether to run the 400m hurdles], we will see how the season progresses, and then we will make the necessary adjustments and know what we are doing,” she told the
Observer at Saturday’s Milo Western Relays at GC Foster College of Physical Education and Sport, in Angels, St Catherine.

Asked why she would make the change, Salmon, who has a personal best of 53.82 seconds over the hurdles, the eighth best time overall by a Jamaican and fourth among active competitors, fired back quickly, “because I am equally good in the 400m but I have not run as many 400m, but I am definitely just as good.”

Salmon, who finished fourth in the women’s 400m hurdles at last year’s National Senior Championships but made the team to the World Athletics Championships in Budapest, Hungary, as part of the women’s 4x400m relay team, had told the
Observer then she felt she was equally competent at both disciplines.

“It seems like a lot of persons have forgotten that I am also a quarter-miler, like the flat 400m runner, and I guess this is going to remind them that I am also good in the 400m,” said Salmon, who ran her personal best 51.22 in the first round of the 400m at the 2023 National Senior Championships.

“I ran the first round of the 4x400m in Budapest and won a silver medal so that says a lot,” she noted on Saturday.

Salmon confirmed that she had made the decision to return home as she felt it was the right time to do so, while adding that she is confident that she will be in the mix for a ticket to the Paris Olympics, once she continues her improvements.

“I felt like I needed a change and I made it,” said the athlete who had been guided by former American athlete Tonja Buford Bailey, right after she won a silver medal in the 400m hurdles at the World Athletics Under-20 championships in Tampere, Finland in 2018.

“My objective each year is just to be better than I was before and I think once I do that I will be okay,” Salmon said. “I am always hungry, everybody wants to be the best and it’s not different for me.”