OLYMPIAN Raymond Stewart is urging Jamaica’s male sprinters to prepare themselves intelligently in order to achieve great things at the international level and sustain their longevity in the sport.

Stewart says that he has maintained a watchful eye on the development of the country’s up-and-coming sprinters and believes they possess all the requisite skills to challenge for a podium finish at the Olympic Games in Paris this summer.

“When you line up, everybody is in that line to win the gold medal — and whoever prepares themselves best is going to be more victorious at the end of the day,” Stewart told the
Jamaica Observer. “To me, they are capable of running any time where they were before, and they should be able to do it again — and even better. So, they’ve got to know that it takes preparation and the smart way of doing it.

“They are great guys, but there might be something missing from them being greater in a sense where their preparation is not on the same path. But, I think they can go out there and perform with anybody — I have seen it and they have done it before — so that should give them more confidence to know that, ‘I have competed with the best and I have beaten the best before.’ So the only thing stopping them is themselves, based on preparations towards what they need to accomplish.”

Stewart, 59 and now based in Austin, Texas, earned a silver medal on Jamaica’s 4x100m relay team at the Los Angeles Games in 1984.

At age 19 he was the youngest person to compete in an Olympic Games 100m men’s final. Stewart, who competed in four Olympics for Jamaica, was the first athlete to reach three straight 100m finals at the Games. He became the first Jamaican man to break the 10-second barrier when he ran 9.97s at the NCAA National Championships in the United States in 1989. He then lowered the mark to 9.96 in 1991.

Stewart maintained that with the Olympic Games just months away so it is not too late for Jamaica’s athletes to make necessary adjustments to their preparations to be ready.

“To be real frank, these guys are good guys; they can run as fast as they did last year. But if they change what they did last year to compensate because it is an Olympic year, then it is like changing everything that stands for them to perform at the level that they did last year,” he reasoned. “My advice to these guys is that: ‘It is not too late to get back to what you do to get back to the top.’ “

Stewart says that the Jamaicans should make use of the technology available to them now in the sport because back in his day it was very hard to get the level of support they are receiving now.

“They are in a better situation now than us because there are so many things available to these guys now, compared to us back then,” he said. “You see, I used to be out there running at a championship, and the only time someone did a massage on me is when I got to a championship; I didn’t have that type of luxury.

“These guys have a lot of stuff in front of them now so that gives them a little more advantage than us back then, but if they don’t use it to their advantage, what they do, the results are going to show for themselves.”