The Island's Secret #3: The US-Jamaica doping networks at the centre of Olympic glory
The court for the Southern District of New York has prosecuted drug trafficking and doping crimes which has laid bare the reality of the deeply linked worlds of Jamaican and American sprinting.
Every Monday and Thursday, I publish a press-round up of all the doping and sports medicine stories in the media from the past seven days.
This Long Read is the final article in a three-part series on doping, and drug trafficking, in Jamaican sprinting.
It is the product of several years of research.
You can read Part 1 (here) and Part 2 (here).
A certain Anthony Brown was an assistant track and field coach at St. Jago High School, which is one of Jamaica’s oldest educational establishments.
The school boasts one of the best junior track and field teams in the country and its former alumni includes the Olympic gold medallists Yohan Blake, Melaine Walker and Nickel Ashmeade. During Brown’s time coaching at the school in the late 1990s, the girls’ track team won four consecutive titles at the Boys and Girls Athletics Championships, better known as ‘Champs’ as you now know.
Brown, however, was using his coaching position on the boy’s track team for his own motives.
In 2012, Brown testified before a US grand jury that both he and two school friends had trafficked cocaine into the US when the team competed internationally at the Penn Relays held in Philadelphia in the late nineties.