Shashalee Forbes has taken the elevation to being one of the three Jamaicans who will line up in the women’s 100m Friday’s opening day of track and field at the Paris Olympic Games in stride.

The 28-year-old SprinTec Track Club athlete, initially named a member of the women’s sprint relay pool, arrived in France just over a week ago with the intention of competing relays later in the Games. However, Wednesday’s shock withdrawal of Shericka Jackson threw Forbes into the spotlight of the competition and gave her a place in the individual event.

“As a professional athlete, and once the opportunity presents itself you just have to take it,” she said on SprinTec’s Instagram platform.

Forbes, who has a personal best 10.96 seconds set last year, ran 11.03, her season’s best, in the first round at the National Championships in late June. She clocked 11.04 for fourth in the final.

It will not be her first time running the 100m at a global championships after she qualified for the semi-finals at last year’s World Athletics Championships in Budapest, Hungary. Forbes is to join former champion Shelly-Ann Fraser-Pryce and Tia Clayton as the Jamaicans in one of the most eagerly anticipated events at the Games.

Jackson had pulled up in a 200m race in Hungary in early July and has not raced competitively since then. She had been down to contest both the 100m and 200m events at the Olympics. Since pulling out of the 100m she has said she intends to contest the 200m which starts on Sunday.

Forbes wished Jackson all the best.

“I really do hope that whatever reason it is that my fellow teammate has pulled out of the 100 metre [race] she’s in the best of health. I am here to run for myself, my country’s pride, and to give it my all.”

Forbes was a member of the Jamaican women’s 4x100m team that won silver at the 2016 Olympics in Rio de Janeiro; a bronze medal at the 2017 World Championships in London; and a silver last year when she ran the third leg in the finals in Budapest.

Maurice Wilson, head coach of the delegation and also Forbes’ coach at the GC Foster College-based SprinTec, said in separate post that he was not in a position to say what her mindset was.

Wilson said it was “unfortunate that the second fastest 200m runner is not in a position to run the 100m, so the next qualified person who is Shashalee Forbes, would be the automatic placement in that position”.

He added: “Based on my discussions with Shashalee, [she] came here to run the relay and that was the intention. There is now an opportunity to run the 100m, I cannot tell how she’s going to perform because, as I said, she came here to run the relays but a space [in the 100m] has been opened up, so we just wish her the best, just like any other athlete if they had been in a qualifying position to run, we would have wished them the best.

“So let’s see what happens and hoping that our athlete who was not able to run the 100m will be ready to run her other event,” Wilson said.