The Olympic triumph of two small Caribbean islands

As of the start of the Paris Games, 68 of the 26 countries with an Olympic committee have yet to win a medal. Today there are only 66 ‘virgin’ countries. Saint Lucia and Dominica, two small islands in the Caribbean, celebrated as a national holiday on Saturday the gold medals of their favorite daughters, Julien Alfred, 100-meter champion, and Thea Lafond, queen of the triple jump.

They are mostly neighboring islands. Saint Lucia, Alfred’s homeland, became independent from the United Kingdom in 1979 and debuted at the Atlanta 96 Games. With an area of ​​just 616 square kilometers, it has 183,000 inhabitants and ranks 174th place in the GDP ranking, which marks the gross domestic product. . Dominica, where Lafond was born, has been independent since 1967 and has only 72,000 inhabitants. They will all fit together at the Stade de France on the day of the final. At 751 km2, it also debuted at the 1996 Games.

Are they two miracles? Given the economic precariousness and size of the two states, it seems so. Dominica has only one stadium, but no athletics track. Construction started a few years ago, but so far it is still unusable. Saint Lucia also does not have its own infrastructure or sports aid system, so the path of the two Olympic champions is the same, moving to the United States and the powerful American university athletics program, where they are enrolled. Something that has already been experienced in other small Antillean islands such as Grenada, with four-year-old Kirani James, Bahamas or Saint Kitts and Nevis, which once had a 100-year-old world champion, Kim Collins, they all trained in the United States. Not to mention the tremendous athleticism of Cuba and Jamaica, who find a way to grow without having to move systemically. The genetic potential of the area is evident: 14 Caribbean islands have Olympic medals.

The two protagonists of this story are flag bearers for their countries at the opening of the Games. Alfred, 23 years old, the new fastest woman in the world, lives and trains in Austin, Texas. He started running barefoot in Saint Lucia as a child. He wanted to quit athletics at the age of 12 after the death of his father, but his coach at the time, knowing his potential, convinced him to continue after seeing his systematic win against. males older than two and three years old. He went to Jamaica alone at age 14, and then got a scholarship to go to Austin, where in 2023 he was chosen as the best student-athlete of the year.

Lafond, 30, had never achieved a major podium before, with two fifth-place finishes at the World Championships as his highest achievements. He came to Silver Spring, Maryland, as a child with his family. From volleyball he soon moved to athletics. A journalism graduate and special educator at a school, she ended up marrying her coach, Aaron Gadson. In Paris, after his gold medal, they kept asking him about his country, and his greatest emphasis was to emphasize that “we are Dominica, not the Dominican Republic,” tired of seeing the errors published about his nationality. And he demanded that his government finally build an athletics track on the island.