The curtains have come down on the 19th staging of the World Athletics Championships in Budapest, Hungary and man, what a finish it was. The final event, the women’s 4x400m relay, literally came down to the last few metres as Femke Bol broke Jamaican hearts all over the world when she pipped Stacey-Ann Williams on anchor to give the Netherlands their first ever medal in this event. It was a full-circle, sweet revenge moment for the Dutch Dolly, who had fallen just about 10m before she could get to the finish line in the first final of the games, the mixed 4x400m relay. But mumz, why yu did afi tek revenge pon we? We deven did mek di finals! We did want yu beat Dem People too innuh.😭
Anyway, it is finished and Jamaica claimed 12 medals, equalling the number from Beijing in 2015 and one less than our best haul ever in Berlin in 2009. However, in terms of quality, we have fewer gold medals than we did on either of those two occasions. In the postmortem, we can complain about the missed opportunities and who underperformed, or we can be grateful that we got such a good haul because these games were marked by crosses in the form of injuries and other setbacks. I’m choosing the latter, especially after yesterday’s events which saw my forever bae Shelly-Ann Fraser-Pryce put her body on the line to ensure the women’s 4x100m relay team could medal. She now has a slight hamstring tear, so her season is most likely done and could go down in history as one of her most difficult ones ever. But we hope she’ll come back in tip top shape for the Paris Olympics next year and get to run that ever elusive 10.5 seconds race that she knows she has in her.
In my efforts not to wallow and dwell on the negatives, I’m only going to take a look back at the moments that made World Champs special for me. Here goes:
Written by Tracey 