There’s a call for athletes selected to represent this country in track and field meets to have access to the Leonora Synthetic Track ahead of these games.

It came from Julian Edmonds, the coach and manager for Guyana’s team to the South American Youth Championships this past weekend in Cali, Colombia.
Guyana won 400m gold through Jason Yaw – twice breaking the record and silver through Natricia Hooper in the Girls 400m, a narrow loss.
‘The last 5 sessions we had before we left for the games, these athletes were training on the roadway of the National Park because most of the grounds around Georgetown were flooded.
We have a stadium over the river, we asked the President of the AAG if we could get permission to go and have at least couple sessions on the track and I think making contact with the person to make that decision was a bit difficult,’ said Edmonds at the Cheddi Jagan International Airport upon his arrival on Monday night.
Olympian Winston George was granted access to the facility in preparation for the recently concluded Central American and Caribbean Games in Mexico.
Edmonds believes the athletes could have put in better times, had they been granted access to the facility.
Vice-President of the Athletics Association of Guyana –Gavin Hope met the team as they arrived and congratulated them on their performances.
“We’ve done exceptional and it therefore means that we can do better. We all know we have issues with the facilities and how our athletes train and prepare, and if we can perform at this level with facilities that we have, hopefully next year when we have more facilities available to our athletes we can see greater improvements, higher standards being achieved by our athletes.”
He continued, “This is not about the AAG, this is about our athletes who would have worked hard under whatever conditions and are producing at the highest level and we want to congratulate them and urge them to continue because somewhere, somehow, sometime down the road, people will see what talent we have in Guyana and will genuinely come and go and try and help take our athletes to the next level.”
Yaw resisted 46.79 seconds on his way to gold. In the heats he first broke the old record of 47.46 seconds when he stopped the clock at 47.42 seconds.
That time puts him as the 9th best junior time in the year and the 2nd fastest time behind the youth Olympics champion Martin Manly from Jamaica.
Of his performance Yaw said, “I’m feeling great about my performance. I was expecting to come away with gold.”
This outing was the first international 400m event for Hooper. She was on course for gold with about three metres to go when she was edged on the line.
To her credit though, her personal best of 55.05 seconds was an automatic qualifier to the World Youth Championships to be held back in Cali, Colombia next July.
Edmonds said inexperience was what cost her gold.
She was pleased with her performance. Hooper recalled that the language barrier proved a challenge for her on the track when they were under the starter’s orders.

(By Leeron Brumell)