The whole purpose of this web magazine has always been to educate the world at large on Jamaica. At this point what bothers me most is the incredible "bad-minded" attitude of the Americans towards our athletic success on the World Stage, and more particularly our recent performance at the Olympics. Why is it that that when anyone but they do well in a particular arena they decide there must be a reason for it? The United States must be the richest, biggest and best at everything. I have not heard us or any other country casting doubts on American athletes who win, say eight gold medals, in their sport.

The latest "bad mouth" has been to question the athletes in general and Bolt in particular. Former US champion, Carl Lewis, is the latest to jump on the bandwagon in an interview in Sports Illustrated. He questions Bolt's ability to go from 10sec to 9.6sec in a year. Mr Lewis and others have obviously not looked further back than a year in Usain's history. At age twelve at his tiny primary school in the foothills of the Cockpit Country he became their fastest sprinter ever. What performance enhancing drugs did they give him then, good Trelawny yellow yam and some of the cleanest air in the world? When he entered William Knibb Memorial High School, still in Trelawny, his coaches saw an incredible potential. WKMHS, despite being in the deepest countryside, has an excellent reputation for athletics and one of Usain's coaches there was former Olympian, Pablo McNeil. Under his coaching Bolt won a silver medal at high school level at the age of fourteen. Mr McNeil is reputed to have been frustrated by Usain's lack of commitment to training as he saw an unbelievable potential in him. But then how many adolescents do you know who are committed to anything serious?

That year he went to his first regional games, the CARIFTA Games and won silver in the 200m and 400m. In the World Junior Championships at that time he was more interested in having fun than qualifying and one of his now famous practical jokes required police intervention. In 2002 the World Junior Championships were held in Kingston and it was then that the gangly fifteen year old was first christened "Lightening Bolt" by the Jamaican press. He won the 200m in 20.61 and became the youngest world junior medalist ever. He also helped the 4x100m and the 4x400m win silver. He so impressed the International community that he was awarded the IAAF Rising Star Award for 2002. The following year, in the World Junior Championships, he set a record in the 200m. At that time the world 200m record holder, American Michael Johnson, worried that Bolt's handlers might be pressuring him too much and should look to his potential four or five years down the line. At sixteen Usain was clocking times that Johnson himself had not reached til twenty.

At seventeen Bolt was brought into Kingston to the MVP Centre at UTech (the University of Technology) a world class training facility. He declined scholarships to several American Universities insisting that he wanted to stay at home. Though he had travelled in his junior career that had been under controlled circumstances. He was now a teenager from the country in a big city and behaved as any other teenager would, preferring partying and eating fast food to training. A hamstring injury in 2004 took him out of the 2004 World Junior Championships and led to his poor performance in the 2004 Olympics. Bolt's career did not start in 2004 as some foreigners  think but instead transitioned from Junior to Senior.

So to Carl Lewis and all the other critics out there, anyone who had seen the twelve year old in the country or the fifteen year old nationally would not be in the least bit surprised at the world Super-Bolt now. That rare performer who comes along less than once per generation as his manager said on TVJ this morning.

The other issue being bruited about is that we don't have a random drug testing programme. We do indeed have a random drug-testing programme. It might not be "the best in the world" like the Americans say theirs is but it is quite good. One of the Team Doctors, Dr Elliott, speaking recently said that athletes are tested as often as sixteen times a month during the season. I imagine it would be less in the off season. I am not medically trained but it would seem to me that most performance enhancing drugs would stay in the body longer than a day or two. And certainly the eaters of sour grapes would also be criticising the International Olympic Association, the World Anti-Doping Agency and others for, aside from regular testing at home, our athletes are subjected to testing each and every time they go to an international meet to the extent that Asafa Powell though that the frequent testing running up to the Olympics might affect his health. Carl Lewis, in the same interview suggests that it is because Veronica Campbell lives in the US, and is subject to their "better" testing and therefore "clean," that she did not make the qualifying grade for Jamaica's 100m team. Does Mr Lewis realise that Veronica's forth place time was under 10sec and still faster than many of the American team. There just happened to be three women who were faster. It happens.

And surely our athletes cannot be held to blame for anything which God or nature has created in them for, as the latest research being undertaken at the University of Glasgow suggests, our talent may very well be in our actual genetic make-up. But knowing the Americans, they will either lobby to have the naturally occurring gene, Actinen A, outlawed or more likely have it genetically engineered into all of their athletes.