TODAY (July 26) is when the Paris 2024 Olympics officially gets going, but the track and field action begins on Friday, August 2.

Paris 2024 Olympics

Jamaica’s 400 metres queen delivered yet another blockbuster performance in her 400m Diamond debut in London.

With our two sprint queens Shelly-Ann Fraser-Pryce and Shericka Jackson experiencing several setbacks leading up to the Games, up stepped one of our new queens, Nickisha Pryce, who delivered a blockbuster 400m performance at the London leg of the Diamond League on Saturday, July 20.

Just a few weeks after setting a new area and national record in the women’s 400 metres (48.89s), Jamaica’s rising sensation shattered that time (among others) in her sensational professional debut at the London Diamond league meet, racing to a new personal best 48.57s. Wow, just wow!

Pryce’s performance was a new world lead, brushing aside the 48.75s done by American super woman Sydney McLaughlin-Leverone who had initially surpassed Pryce’s then world lead of 48.89s — a day after Pryce had set the new world lead. Indeed, Nickisha’s impressive run of 48.57s places her as the second-fastest woman from the Caribbean, behind only Shaunae Miller-Uibo of The Bahamas who set a personal best of 48.36s at the 2019 world championships. Incredibly, her performance last weekend is the third-fastest time in the last 39 years; only Bahrain’s Salwa Eid Naser’s 48.14s and Miller-Uibo’s 48.36s have been faster.

More impressively, Nickisha’s time of 48.57s eclipsed the American record of 48.70s set by Sanya Richards-Ross in September 2006, making her the fastest Jamaican-born woman in the 400m. With that said, Nickisha Pryce will be confident in making her debut at the Olympic Games. And she is no stranger to the world’s biggest stage when it comes to track and field either as at the 2023 Budapest World Championship she was a part of the Jamaican 4×400 metres relay team that won silver.

Shericka Jackson – Almost a year ago Shericka Jackson stunned the athletics world when she won gold at the World Athletics Championships on August 25, running a sensational and second-fastest 200 metres time ever of 21.41s — just a mere seven hundredth of a second behind Florence Griffith-Joyner’s amazing (but suspicious) world record of 21.34s done in Seoul in 1988. Indeed, Shericka Jackson also won silver in the 100m in 10.72s, behind winner Shacarri Richardson’s 10.65s. Since failing to make it out of the heats at the Tokyo 2020 Olympic Games, Shericka has dominated the 200-metre event and made it back-to-back world titles in Budapest, and has her sights set on breaking Griffith-Joyner’s record of 21.34s. However, her dreams of breaking the 200m record might have to wait a while longer as in her first race since winning both the 100m and 200 metres at the Jamaica trials she got injured in Hungary while running a 200m race. She was leading that race before slowing down and walking across the finish line, putting her Olympic participation in doubt.