Blake happy with pre-Olympic plans

The Jamaican Olympic team will meet for its pre-Games training camp in Japan.

The venue, located in the southern Japanese city Tottori Prefecture, will be made available as part of a longstanding partnership with Jamaica and Warren Blake, president of the Jamaica Athletics Administrative Association, is relieved to have the venue secured.

“This has been arranged from some years ago because we have a longstanding relationship with Tottori Prefecture and they have again offered to host our camp. We went there in 2015 when the World Championships was in China and the comments we got from the athletes were that the facilities were excellent and the hospitality was really first class, so they offered to host us again and we have taken up the offer,” Blake said.

In fact, Tottori hosted the Jamaican athletics team prior to the 2007 and 2015 World Championships in Osaka, Japan and Beijing, China respectively. In 2017, a Memorandum of Understanding was signed to cover the hosting of the entire Olympic team in 2020.

When the camp is over, the team will make the 500 kilometre journey to the Olympic village in the Japanese capital of Tokyo.

Mindful of difficult searches for training camp venues in the past, Blake is pleased to have the matter settled well in advance.

“That is quite a relief because even in Brazil, we were in March, April before we finalised where we were going for the camp,” he explained with reference to the 2016 Olympic Games in Rio di Janeiro, Brazil.

The Games return to Tokyo for the first time since 1964 and begin on July 24.

However, when the capital hosted the 1991 World Championships, Jamaica won 1 gold, 1 silver and 3 bronze medals. The gold came in the women’s 4x100m from Michelle Freeman, Juliet Cuthbert, Bev McDonald and Merlene Ottey.