Veronica Campbell-Brown

Thus far this century, Jamaica has won three individual World or Olympic titles in track and field, and two of them have been won by Veronica Campbell-Brown. Since winning the womens 200m Olympic gold medal in Athens, Campbell-Brown has been one of the most competitive and prolific sprinters of her generation.

Campbell-Brown’s illustrious career had its beginnings in Warsop, a farming community in Trelawney Parish in Jamaica. At the age of twelve, Campbell-Brown won both the 100m and 200m at the Jamaican all-ages championships, and was granted a scholarship to the Vere Technical High School in Clarendon, known for producing numerous champion sprinters, including 23-time global medalist Merlene Ottey.

In high school, Campbell-Brown began to make her name known in the world stage. In 1999, she captured the 100m gold at the World Youth Championships, and in 2000 she earned her first Olympic medal, running the second leg for the runner-up Jamaican 4x100m relay team. Fewer than three weeks after her team effort in Sydney, Campbell-Brown won World Junior titles at 100m and 200m.

Following high school, Campbell-Brown enrolled at Barton Community College in Kansas, USA, where she won a number of junior college titles, before transferring to the University of Arkansas. Sidelined by an injury in 2003, Campbell-Brown’s coach, Lance Brauman (who also coaches Tyson Gay, among others) limited her collegiate races in 2004 in anticipation of the Athens Olympics. The decision paid off, as Campbell-Brown ran away with the Olympic gold medal in the 200m, and also won the bronze medal in the 100m for added measure. It was also though her training group that she met her recently wed husband, fellow Jamaican sprinter and Commonwealth Games champion Omar Brown, who also trains under Brauman.

Since winning her first two individual Olympic medals in Athens, Campbell-Brown has remained one of the most consistent and dominant sprinters in the history of the sport. She followed up her gold and bronze medals from Athens with a silver in the 100m at the 2005 World Championships in Helsinki, another silver at the 2006 Commonwealth Games over 200m, before picking up two more medals at the 2007 World Championships in Osaka: another silver in the 200m, but more importantly, the gold medal in the 100m. To give perspective as to how competitive she has been since the last Olympics, Campbell-Brown is the only sprinter (male or female) to have run in every global 100m and 200m final since 2004, and from those six finals she has collected five medals, two of them gold. It’s a feat unmatched in the sprinting world, and streak she hopes to continue this August in Beijing.