PARIS, France — MVP Track and Field Club Head Coach Stephen Francis is backing his young sprinter Tia Clayton to do well and make the final of the women’s 100m event.

Clayton, 19, has been a revelation this season, clocking a personal best time of 10.86 seconds in the semi-finals of the women’s 100m event at the JAAA/Puma National Senior Championships last month. She erased her previous best time of 11.02 seconds, set in the first round of the competition. She went on to finish second in the final with a time of 10.90 seconds, behind her clubmate Shericka Jackson who won the event in 10.84 seconds.

Francis said Clayton has been training consistently this season, and once she remains focused and executes a clean race she will have good fortune.

“I think that Tia is going to run better than she did at the trials,” said Francis. “I expect she will make the final, and at that point it just depends on her execution.”

He says she was not at her best at the national championships but he is hoping she will get it right at the Olympic Games.

“The only question is if she is going to be at her very best,” Francis said. “She was slightly off at the national championships, and I am expecting that this time she will be at her very best — and we will see what will happen as a result.”

Francis says Clayton is relatively young in her professional career and is still learning the sport. He said this is in comparison to his former athlete Shelly-Ann Fraser-Pryce, whom he coached to her first Olympic title in 2008 in Beijing, China, when she was 22 years old.

“Tia is young and will be 20 next month,” he said. “At the time that Shelly won, she was relatively mature at 22. It’s all a matter of what Tia wants and how she will approach it, but I do know that we are hoping this time she is going to perform at her best — unlike the trials where she left a tenth or so on the table.”