Leighton Levy, Freelance Writer

FOR ALMOST a decade, track coach Stephen Francis has been building a strong training programme for his MVP/UTech athletes, creating some of the world's best athletes in the process. Michael Frater, Brigitte Foster-Hylton and Asafa Powell are chief among the very, very best.

But for all the outstanding physical talent that Francis has honed, there are chinks in his programme that became glaringly obvious in 2007 when then 100-metre world record holder Powell, MVP's brightest star, suffered a meltdown while leading in the men's sprint final at the World Athletic Championships in Osaka, Japan. Powell admitted as much afterwards, telling the world that he panicked, crumbling under the weight of pressure from a nation with high expectations and the final surge of the eventual world champion Tyson Gay.

Something else also came into focus. At the very highest level, none of the athletes in Francis' programme, for all their physical prowess, possessed an individual gold medal at the very highest level - the Olympics or the World Championships.

Transforming athletes

"One of the things I discovered late in the game is that yeah, we have had a good record of transforming athletes who were not talked about much as teenagers, who were - neglected," Francis said during a Gleaner-sponsored MVP/UTech meeting at the university on Tuesday.

"Even somebody with the highest quality like Michael Frater; nobody believes much in him. He is always the person everybody seems to think is going to get left out and Brigitte, people told her she should be a fashion model and leave the running alone," he said. "Given that this was the background of most of the athletes, what it meant was that they did not know as youngsters how to win, how to become champions, how to accommodate pressure," he said. Before this season, Francis admits, there had never been much emphasis on identifying and overcoming these 'mental' deficiencies, but all that has changed.

"I decided that this year we had to treat that issue as importantly as we treated physical preparation; even more so because these guys, even though they are physically better than other people, some of them are afraid. They are afraid of everybody," Francis said. "Asafa is just getting used to the idea of being better than everybody else. So we spent a lot of time this year talking about what the process is of how to compete. I think it's going to be a fixture in the future."

Francis lamented the lack of experienced sports psychologists locally, but said he plans to employ the available expertise when the MVP team leaves for Europe later this season.

Meanwhile, change has been gradual but it is taking hold. Commonwealth 200-metre champion Sherone Simpson earlier this year revealed that the new focus on mental preparation had helped her a lot.

She said she spends more time now focussing on proper execution of her technique and strategies. During the recently-concluded national trials to select the team to Beijing, Simpson, though finishing third in both short sprints, managed season bests of 10.87 and 22.11.

Shelly-Ann Fraser, Simpson's 19-year-old MVP teammate, also showed great mental toughness while competing against Jamaica's most seasoned champion, Olympic gold medallist Veronica Campbell, and rising talents like national champion Kerron Stewart and Simpson.

Strong competition

Francis revealed that before then she was afraid of all three women. She beat Simpson and Campbell in the 100m dash, clocking a personal best of 10.85, a performance that thrust her from obscurity into the elite company of Merlene Ottey, Juliet Cuthbert, Stewart and Simpson and Campbell as Jamaica's fastest ever women.

Frater also had a season best 10.04 over the 100m at the national trials, 0.01 outside his personal best as he chased teammate Powell (9.97) and national champion and world record holder Usain Bolt (9.85) to the line last Saturday night.

"I think the results of the trials speak volumes," MVP assistant coach Paul Francis said of how well the newly-introduced programme had worked so far, adding that the best is yet to come. Those chinks now seem to be closing fast.