Nicholas Ro­many, who is one of the over 500 run­ners who have reg­is­tered to com­pete in the 2023 edi­tion of the Chi­na­town 7K road race event will wear num­ber 1 on Sun­day.

It is cus­tom­ary for the de­fend­ing cham­pi­on of a race to get the #1 bib, but this is the in­au­gur­al race and that un­writ­ten rule does not ap­ply. Apart from Ro­many’s de­serv­ing of the seed­ing as the 2023 Cari­com cham­pi­on and al­so the reign­ing NAAA Male Road Run­ner of the Year, the or­gan­is­ers have de­cid­ed to ho­n­our his pres­ence with the top num­ber.

T&T’s top women’s road run­ner Saman­tha Shuk­la will face com­pe­ti­tion from Lin­da Mc­Dowall of St. Vin­cent and the Grenadines. Lin­da’s tick­et for the event is spon­sored by the St Vin­cent and the Grenadines Ath­let­ics Fed­er­a­tion.

Due to flight is­sues, she did not par­tic­i­pate in the Ju­ly Cari­com 10K event which took place in T&T.

All the top lo­cal men’s and women’s road run­ners have reg­is­tered for the event which has a first prize of $3,000 each for the win­ners (men and women).

The re­sults for the Chi­na­town 7K will be based on chip time and not gun time.

Ac­cord­ing to the or­gan­is­ers, ex­cept for the top ten men and women re­sults will be gun time. With gun time, a run­ner’s time starts when the gun (or horn) goes.

With chip time (or net time), a run­ner’s time starts when the run­ner cross­es the start line.

Ray­mond Chin Asang said, “We have the tech­nol­o­gy so why not use it? Dur­ing the eight years that I was Tech­ni­cal Di­rec­tor of the UWI SPEC Half, I al­ways in­sist­ed on us­ing chip time to de­ter­mine the re­sults be­cause of the nar­row­ness of the road at the UWI start, the par­tic­i­pants lin­ing up at the back of the race can take more than two min­utes to cross the start line af­ter the gun goes. We hope the walk­ers and slow jog­gers will line up at the back of the race. It is al­so bet­ter to be pass­ing oth­ers dur­ing a race than to be passed by oth­ers.”

The race will start at the Chi­na­town Arch at Char­lotte Street and the Bri­an Lara Prom­e­nade on In­de­pen­dence Square, Port-of-Spain at 4 pm.

The field will head west along the Bri­an Lara Prom­e­nade make a right on­to Hen­ry St, head­ing north­wards to the Queen’s Park Sa­van­nah, for clock­wise one lap around the Q.P.S., then down Char­lotte Street to fin­ish at the start­ing point.

The race which is put on by the Fui Toong On As­so­ci­a­tion is un­der the joint pa­tron­age of the May­or of Port-of-Spain and the Am­bas­sador of the Peo­ple’s Re­pub­lic of Chi­na.