The en vogue topic in the track and field and even the wider sports community locally is the unbelievable performance of 9.90 seconds by local sprinter Rupert Perry achieved at the Guyana Defence Force ground, Camp Ayangana last Friday.
There, Perry reportedly broke the 10-second barrier, and if the times are legitimate, ran the fastest ever 100m by a Guyanese athlete. According to the official results, Perry also clocked 20 seconds flat in the 200m.
Those performances will not be accepted as Guyana’s national record because they were not achieved at an international meet where they would have technology in place to verify its validity. Guyana’s obsolete conditions, where the hand-timed system is still employed and where there is nothing in place to measure wind speed and level of wind assistance, makes it difficult to respect last Friday’s time as valid.
Technical delegate of the meet and IAAF certified official Mark Scott wished not to comment directly on the validity of the times but he did speak to the conditions of the meet and the quality of timekeepers.
“Well to be honest with you I personally measured the track and verified that it was 100m and as for the timekeepers there, as I said before, there were trained timekeepers that have been doing this for years,” Scott said.
How the hand-timed system works is that officials are positioned five metres away from the last lane in line with the finish line. Those timekeepers then pay attention at the starter’s gun looking for the flare of the pistol in order to begin timing the event. Three timekeepers are supposed to be assigned to record each athlete’s performance but in Guyana, where there is a shortage of officials, the three timekeepers only record the times of the first and sometimes the second place finisher.
If the times are not identical for a particular athlete then timekeepers use the middle time of the three. In the case of Perry’s 9.90 second race, chief timekeeper Cornel Rose said that the three times were not accurate but all three timekeepers got sub-10 performances.
Scott acknowledged the inadequacies of the obsolete system, and stated that the possibility of having inaccurate timings is not far-fetched as factors, such as one’s eye sight and reaction time could easily assist in the time produced. Scott added that he was a bit puzzled as to why the 23-year old Perry is unable to produce similar times on rubberised tracks. Perry’s electronically timed personal best performance on rubber is almost a second slower than the 9.9s that he reportedly clocked to win the Inter Service Annual Athletic Championship 100m.
One point to note according to Scott, was that if the 9.90 seconds hand-timed was to be considered next to an electronically timed performance under the new IAAF rule, .25 seconds would have to be added to it, making it 10.15s.
Perry had benefited from a training stint earlier this year in Jamaica at the Racers Track Club with Olympic Champion and world record holder Usain Bolt and 2011 100m World Champion Yohan Blake. However, Perry’s training was hampered a few months into the stint after suffering from an ankle injury.
Scott said that Perry has been consistently running unbelievable times on local soil and he hopes that in the future he would be able to run similar times on a synthetic track.
However, this is no easy feat as only 83 athletes in the world have broken the 10-second barrier (valid and recognised performance) beginning with American Jim Hines in 1968. Prior to the electronically timed system, only nine athletes, including Jamaican Don Quarrie broke the 10 second barrier and they all were given the manually timed world record of 9.9s. All nine men simultaneously held the world record, which the IAAF later acknowledged, that some of the times may have been inaccurate because of the technology utilized.
Whether or not Perry actually ran 9.9 seconds and is the fastest sprinter Guyana has ever seen, what is apparent is that Guyana needs to upgrade its infrastructure and facilities to facilitate its constantly improving athletes. Guyana needs the equipment for electronic timing and photo finish as well as a synthetic track to accompany it. Anything less is likely to leave athletes stagnant at the domestic plain, competing for miniscule local honours rather than competing at the Olympic Games especially in the sprint events.
