§1.  Jamaica has produced some of the world’s best athletes, including stars such as Usain Bolt and Veronica Campbell-Brown. Is this success partly due to one event  — the Jamaica Schools’ Championships?

§2.  The four-day Championships have taken place every year since 1910. Nearly 200 school students take part in front of an audience of over 30,000 people. The event is also shown on live TV, and the whole country watches what is sometimes called Jamaica’s mini-Olympics. The competitors take it very seriously, and they all want to win. Classmates and former students also come to support and encourage their schools.

§3.  School coach Dwayne Simpson has trained many young stars. He believes the Championships have an important role in the development of young athletes. They are the biggest schools’ competition in the world, he says, and other countries are now looking to copy them. He also believes that the Championships give young athletes a reason to practise. They want to do well for their school, so they work and train together as a team, so they produce better results.

§4.  The Championships have turned many young students into stars, but those who are most talented as adults don’t always win as young teenagers. Olympic gold medallist Usain Bolt, for example, failed to win a single race at the Championships as an under-15 runner. Olympic champion Veronica Campbell-Brown was always easily beaten in the lower-age groups before finally winning as an older student.

§5. Nathaniel Day, a young runner from Britain, has studied and trained in Jamaica for the last two years. «Young athletes here get experience of being on TV from the age of 12», he says, «so when they’re older, they aren’t scared of big occasions and they perform well. In the UK, athletes don’t perform in front of the cameras until they’re adults, and sometimes they find it hard to deal with». As Nathaniel says, the Championships also give young athletes a goal. «Because it’s such a big event, it gives them an idea of how exciting it is to perform in an Olympic stadium. It helps them develop the ambition to become champions».