Clearly Jamaican sprinter Veronica Campbell personifies this expression. Her come-from-behind victory in the 100 metres at the World Championships proves she is a true champion of the highest calibre, even amongst Caribbean athletes. With her 100 m gold at the Worlds added to her 2004 Olympic 100m gold, 200m silver and 4×100 gold, not to mention her 100m silver at the 2005 Worlds, she is showing that she may well be one of the best Caribbean sprinters ever.
What was most striking was how she won her race. She started badly and was well behind but she never gave up. Man, if you see the replays of the race…Ronnie Campbell clawed her way in there, she was fighting every step for that gold. God knows, I rate her even more now.
And on the other hand there is Asafa Powell, the 100m world record holder. He has clocked 9.77 THREE TIMES in the last two years, so clearly his speed is no fluke. But when it comes to the big events, the ones that make the difference between being a legend and an also ran…Asafa just ‘na mek it. A very different c-word is floating around him and it’s not champion. He’s starting to look a lot like a choker.
No-one is more bitterly disappointed than I am that he is not living up to his potential. I was annoyed at the 2004 Olympics but I was willing to forgive. He was a contender then, not a world leader. But now I cannot be so forgiving. He came into the race as the man to beat. The world record holder. Di big man. And he failed. Don’t even tell me nothing bout bronze, cos bronze at 9.96 don’t cut it when you running 9.7s like water otherwise. For Asafa Powell, less than gold is failure. But what was most striking is how he lost the race.
Man, if you see the replays. It was the exact inverse of Ronnie Campbell’s race. The man was LEADING you know, had that pissy American Tyson Gay well beat. And then when Gay started to rally, he just…gave up. He just literally started to pull up and slow down and it was like ‘WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU DOING?’
In an insightful article in Barbados’ Monday Nation, long-time sports writer Mike King made a very good point about Powell’s continuing failures at the big events.
For all the hoopla about Powell, he seems to suffer from panic cramps when the major meets come up.
At the Athens Olympics in 2004, he left without a medal and at the previous World Championships, he was a no-show, claiming he was injured. World records without Olympic gold or World Championship glory mean little. A case in point is American Leroy Burrell. He held the world record at 9.85 secs, but never shone at the Olympics and is just a footnote in the history of track and field.
Carl Lewis, Michael Jordan, Tiger Woods, Michael Schumacher and Roger Federer are modern-day greats because they all delivered when it mattered.
Now you know things gotta be bad if I agreeing with Mike King! 
Jamaica Gleaner writer Audley Boyd also wrote a good piece outlining the difference between a champ like Campbell and a seeming choker like Powell.
Powell said he panicked. Clearly the burden of expectation on him was huge. But he has choked before at other times when he was just one of many of whom there were great expectations. The pressure will only get worse, not better and he has made bad for himself. This is even more so now that there seems to be a (for now since I have no trust in American athleres) legitimate contender for the title of World’s Fastest Man in Tyson Gay and yet another in Bahamian Derrick Atkins (who by the way is Powell’s 2nd cousin who migrated when he was 2- that is a seriously impressive gene pool there).
His defeat now will mean that by next year’s Olympics, the expectations and anticipations and snide ‘he’s a choker’ comments will have had a whole year to simmer and intensify and reach a high boil. Pressure? He ent start to feel pressure yet.
