T&T’s star ath­lete Jereem Richards sees a bright fu­ture for lo­cal track and field ath­letes fol­low­ing their 23-medal win­ning per­for­mance at the 49th Carif­ta Games which end­ed on Mon­day in Kingston, Ja­maica.

This coun­try’s medal haul in­clud­ed two gold medals, 11 sil­ver and 10 bronze which earned them the fourth place on the ta­ble, one spot down from its third-place fin­ish when the re­gion’s pre­mier track and field meet was last held in 2019. Then, T&T won 24 medals (5 gold, 7 sil­ver, 12 bronze).

“I think ac­tu­al­ly it wasn’t bad,” said Richards, yes­ter­day. “I saw some young ath­letes step to the plate, step to the ta­ble and were able to per­form at a high lev­el. It gave me a lot of hope in terms of the younger gen­er­a­tion com­ing for­ward.”

Richards shared that he was very im­pressed by some of the per­for­mances.

“Ob­vi­ous­ly, the high jump and the 1,500m but me, I’m a 4x400m run­ner, so I was very im­pressed by the two boys Un­der-17 and U-20 4x400m re­lay teams. They did ex­cep­tion­al­ly. I saw that they put every­thing out there and was able to per­form at a high lev­el.”

On the open­ing day of the three-day meet which was ab­sent for two years due to the COVID-19 pan­dem­ic, Keer­an Sriskan­dara­jah and Aaron An­toine picked up gold medals. Sriskan­dara­jah reached the top of the podi­um in the boys’ U-17 1,500m and lat­er Sat­ur­day, An­toine best­ed the high jump event.

It was on the fi­nal day, the 4x400m teams which Richards re­ferred to, shined, cop­ping sil­ver in their re­spec­tive fi­nals. In both in­stances, the Ja­maican teams pre­vailed.

Richards said, “With the young (Dy­lan) Woodruffe, I would say I saw a lot of ex­pe­ri­ence and ma­tu­ri­ty the move that he made on the home straight most in­ex­pe­ri­enced peo­ple might try to go out and pass on the out­side and he wait­ed, very ex­pe­ri­enced, to run on the in­side when he saw that open­ing. It just got me ex­cit­ed for some­body that young to be able to make a move like that with such ex­pe­ri­ence and ma­tu­ri­ty.

“Al­so with Cyril (Sum­n­er), I saw the fight in him. He fight just to make sure we were able to get a medal and he ac­tu­al­ly gave us a chance that might have been able to be a gold medal but he fight straight through the line and was still able to pro­duce a sil­ver medal.”

At present, he is not sure if any of them can make it to the World Ath­let­ics Cham­pi­onships (Ju­ly 15-24) of the Birm­ing­ham Com­mon­wealth Games in Eng­land (Ju­ly 28-Au­gust 8), but he sees promise in the up­com­ing track and field stars.

“I hope so but they def­i­nite­ly ig­nit­ed that flame of hope in­side me that the younger gen­er­a­tion will be ready when its time be­cause they showed a lot of po­ten­tial, they showed a lot of grit and they showed the abil­i­ty to rise to the oc­ca­sion at a high-lev­el com­pe­ti­tion,” said Richards, who ex­pressed the need for the an­nu­al re­gion­al meet which takes place over the East­er week­end.

“It’s very im­por­tant, these Games are fun­da­men­tal, like a step­ping stone on the way to be­come a se­nior ath­lete, a world cham­pi­on, an Olympic cham­pi­on. The things that you learn the lessons that you learn from win­ning or los­ing all these things add up on the jour­ney to be­come a cham­pi­on so Carif­ta Games is very, very im­por­tant.”

He left a mes­sage for the younger gen­er­a­tion, say­ing: “I would say to the younger ath­letes, es­pe­cial­ly the ones maybe wasn’t able to per­form as well as they would have liked to, don’t take a loss as some­thing bad. Use this as an op­por­tu­ni­ty to be­come the best ath­lete you could ever be­come, learn from your mis­takes, learn from your ex­pe­ri­ences so that the next time you are giv­en the op­por­tu­ni­ty you’ve been there and done that be­fore, so now you can rise to the oc­ca­sion and pro­duce some best per­for­mances than they’ve ever pro­duced be­fore.”

Ja­maica again dom­i­nat­ed the Games with a tal­ly of 92 medals - 45 gold, 29 sil­ver and 18 bronze. In sec­ond place was the Ba­hamas with 17 medals (4 gold, 6 sil­ver, 7 bronze) while the British Vir­gin Is­lands (BVI) was third with sev­en medals (4 gold, 2 sil­ver, 1 bronze), fol­lowed by T&T in fourth and Guyana fill­ing the fifth spot with sev­en medals (2 gold, 3 sil­ver, 2 bronze).

“For the most part I’m sat­is­fied es­pe­cial­ly not be­ing able to com­pete in the Carif­ta Games for two years hav­ing to strug­gle with COVID and be­ing able to train and all these things be­ing im­ped­ed I think they did their best,” said Richards, who on the week­end won the men’s 200m at the UF Tom Jones Memo­r­i­al in Gainsville, Flori­da, USA.