04/04/2026
Forty consecutive years atop the CARIFTA Games medal table. Not a streak built on luck. Built on a pipeline that starts on parish tracks, runs through Champs, and lands in Grenada this weekend with 80 athletes wearing black, green and gold.
Since 1985, Jamaica has finished first at every single staging of the Caribbean’s premier junior athletics championship. In 2025, they collected 78 medals in Port of Spain for the 39th straight. The alumni list reads like a hall of fame: Usain Bolt won the Austin Sealy Trophy for most outstanding athlete in 2003 and 2004. Veronica Campbell-Brown took hers in 2001. Yohan Blake in 2007. Kirani James, Shaunae Miller-Uibo, and a generation of Olympic medallists stood on these same CARIFTA podiums as teenagers. The competition doesn’t just develop talent. It announces it to the world.
This year, Jamaica arrives in St George’s fresh from Champs, where over 2,000 athletes competed across five days at the National Stadium. Shanoya Douglas, the defending CARIFTA double sprint champion, clocked a world under-20-leading 10.98 and a national U20 record 22.36 in Kingston last week. She headlines a squad that holds more than 40 of the 71 all-time CARIFTA championship records across all age groups. The depth is structural, not accidental.
Forty is a landmark. But for the coaches, schools, and parish clubs feeding this system year after year, the real number is the one nobody counts: the athletes who never made the team but still ran every morning because they believed they could.
