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Tuesday, July 22, 2025

Thompson seeks to improve

by

20140526

Olympic medal­list Richard Thomp­son has ad­mit­ted that his per­for­mances on the track over the last two years have not been up to mark.

While he was will­ing to go on record on the is­sue, he did not stop there.

Thomp­son re­vealed that plans for his resur­gence were al­ready in train both for lo­cal and in­ter­na­tion­al meets. The im­prove­ments, he said, would help sus­tain this coun­try's cred­i­ble rank­ings in the world of ath­let­ics.

Thomp­son ran an im­pres­sive time of 10.21 in the 100m to cap­ture gold at the Ponce Grand Prix held at the Fran­cis­co "Paquito" Mon­tan­er Sta­di­um, in Ponce, Puer­to Ri­co, on May 17.

Be­fore that, he com­pet­ed at the T&T Elite Twi­light Games, where he ran to vic­to­ry in a time of 10.10.

Yes­ter­day, Thomp­son along­side team­mates Ke­ston Bled­man, Marc Burns, Dar­rel Brown and Ron­del So­ril­lo ran in the men's 4 x 100m at the in­au­gur­al IAAF World Re­lay Cham­pi­onship held at the Thomas Robin­son Sta­di­um in Nas­sau, Ba­hamas.

"To be hon­est, I have not been very con­sis­tent at the sub-tens for the past cou­ple of years. I have a lot of im­prove­ment to do if I want to com­pete with (Us­ain) Bolt. Ob­vi­ous­ly, I have to im­prove my train­ing sig­nif­i­cant­ly. I went to the Michael John­son Per­for­mance Cen­tre in Dal­las on the off sea­son and there were a few ex­er­cis­es that they showed me to strength­en the weak­ness that they de­tect­ed. Bri­an Lewis and the (TT) Olympic Com­mit­tee were re­spon­si­ble for send­ing me across. What they do over there, they run you through a se­ries of ex­er­cis­es and they de­tect your weak­ness­es and de­fi­cien­cies. I've been able to in­cor­po­rate that in­to my pro­gramme this year. It's tak­ing a lit­tle while, be­cause I was in­jured be­fore, but it al­lowed me to be strong again, to be healthy again and I just have to keep build­ing on it, to where I am stronger than where I was be­fore. I knew there were things that I need­ed to work on. That was part of the rea­son I went across there in the first place," he said.

Thomp­son added, "Ob­vi­ous­ly, there is al­ways some­thing to im­prove on re­gard­less of how fast you are run­ning. I think even some­one like Bolt and Yohan Blake and those guys. I still feel like there is some­thing every­one else can cor­rect, whether its strength and speed or im­prov­ing your tech­nique. To say that I was sur­prised to find a de­fi­cien­cy, I wasn't sur­prised at all. I knew there were things that I need­ed to cor­rect and im­prove on. Un­til some­one reach­es to the top, I think it's dif­fi­cult to say that they can't im­prove or can't de­vel­op. So I don't think there is ever a point where you stop want­i­ng more for your­self. Every ath­lete who has a per­son­al best, when you talk to them, they will tell you there is some­thing else that they could have done in that race to run a faster time and that there is some­thing else I could do in my train­ing to help me run a faster time."

Thomp­son went on to ex­press his view on the de­vel­op­ment sys­tems he be­lieved were nec­es­sary for the growth of track and field in T&T and said lo­cals need­ed to em­u­late Ja­maica's pas­sion for the sport.

The neigh­bour­ing is­land, he said, would con­tin­ue to ex­cel be­cause of their Ju­nior Champs meet held an­nu­al­ly which was nev­er bereft top ath­letes, but of equal im­por­tance ca­pac­i­ty au­di­ences.

"We need to do some­thing in T&T where we are able have these meets, see who the tal­ent­ed kids are from very young and start work­ing our way up with them. I mean, Dar­rel, Marc, my­self, Bled­man, wouldn't be around for­ev­er," he said.

Thomp­son cit­ed the ac­com­plish­ments of young ath­letes Machel Ce­de­nio and Jonathan Fa­ri­na and said in or­der for them to flour­ish they had to be steered in the right di­rec­tion, whether it was the peo­ple to help them make de­ci­sions about what schools they at­tend abroad or whether they had a se­ri­ous and sus­tained de­vel­op­ment struc­ture at stay home.

If their de­vel­op­ment thrust was to be home grown, he said, the ques­tion re­lat­ed to who would train them arose.

"And who is go­ing to train them not just in track and field, but in many dif­fer­ent things: How you deal with the me­dia, how you car­ry your­self in pub­lic. Sim­ple things like that. It's how you breed su­per­stars and that's some­thing we def­i­nite­ly have to look at in T&T," Thomp­son said.

He tack­led the is­sue of arm chair sup­port­ers and said just like there ex­ists a need to nur­ture a new crop of ath­letes, de­vel­op­ing a hard core fan based should be ad­dressed from in­fan­cy.

Thomp­son said the sys­tem where com­pli­men­ta­ry tick­ets were dis­trib­uted to schools to at­tend meets at the Hase­ly Craw­ford Na­tion­al Sta­di­um to wit­ness the per­for­mances of ath­letes in track and field should be pro­mot­ed and sus­tained, too.

"I re­mem­ber go­ing to see Ato run. That got me pas­sion­ate about track and field. If they don't know what's go­ing on, then they have noth­ing to be pas­sion­ate about. Get the word out and then we could start build­ing from there," he said.


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