media_artricles :: 2015

NAAA sprint showdown tonight

Granted their expected progression from the semifinal stage, T&T’s two fastest women for the year, Michelle-Lee Ahye and Kelly-Ann Baptiste, will compete in what is expected to be a thrilling 100m final tonight at the NGC/Sagicor NAAA Open Championships.

Based on their performances this season, neither were required to compete in the 100m preliminaries, which took place last evening. The event resumes today at 2.30 pm, and closes with the women and men’s 100m finals. Tomorrow, the championships will start at the same time and officially close in the evening with a men and women’s 4x100 and 4x400m relays.

Among the hot topics for the biggest track and field event for the year, locally, is the prospect of the familiar Ahye/Baptiste face-off.

Joining them as an automatic qualifier into the semifinals is Reyare Thomas, whose top 100m mark this year is 11.44 seconds. Thomas and all others, however, must be at their best to threaten the favourites. Ahye’s top mark for 2015, set in April, is 10.97 seconds —a mark that currently sees her at number nine in the world for the year. In the list of top wind-assisted times for the year, Ahye ran an exceptional 10.87 seconds back in March, a time which is not eligible to reflect on the official “top list”.

Yet Baptiste, who returned from her two-year ban for doping in January, has made a confident return to action, winning several races and setting a decent season best of 11 seconds, flat, in April.

While she faces a challenge in the 23-year-old Ahye, Baptiste remains as holder of the national record — 10.84 — set in 2010.

On the men’s equivalent, a race, perhaps just as difficult to call, no fewer than 80 athletes, many of whom are national juniors, challenged for a spot in this afternoon’s semifinals, in the preliminaries of the men’s 100m, help last night.

Favourites for the finals are none other than Richard Thompson and Keston Bledman, the two athletes who exchanged the first and second position on the podium for the last four years.

Thompson, the reigning champion, won last year’s final with a blistering effort of 9.82 seconds, which incidentally rewrote the previous national record of 9.85 seconds, set by himself on the very same stage in 2011, when he won his third national 100m title.

Bledman, however, may have something to say as he challenges for a third national 100m gold. Three hundreds of a second separate Bledman and Thompson in terms of their best efforts for the season.

son. Bledman is ranked 20th in the world, but first among T&T runners, with the two marks of 10.01 seconds, a time which he recorded three weeks apart between April and May, compared to Thompson, who sits 26th among the world leaders with his 10.04 run, also recorded twice in under a month in April. In the best wind-assisted times for the year, Bledman is even higher up at tenth with 9.94 seconds.

Rondel Sorrillo and Marc Burns, both sit at number 78 for their season-best 10.17 seconds. They along with their national team-mate, Emmanuel Callender (10.23-second season best), are expected to feature along with the two favourites in tonight’s event-closing final.

Many of the top athletes in action today and tomorrow will be seeking to secure standards that would put them in line for selection to represent T&T at the Pan American Games and the IAAF World Championships.

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