Jamaica — Kingdom of fast kids addicted to running

The tubby-looking lad on the last leg of the sprint relay, standing way out in lane eight, is still waiting to collect the baton as five of his rivals streak away to the line. He does not have a cat in hell's chance of winning.

"He looks too fat to be really fast but you watch that boy!" everyone advises. Then you understand why as something breathtaking, something guaranteed to raise a gasp at its sheer improbability, unfolds in the national stadium of Jamaica's capital, Kingston.

When he snatches the baton, he looks raw and unpolished, his style raggedy, but he runs like the wind. It seems impossible but he begins to sweep past the rest one by one, as a collective, high-pitched "oooh" of excitement ripples through the packed main stand.

By the time he bullets across the line, having piloted his quartet to the most improbable snatched triumph on the line, the "oooohs" have turned into shrieks of delight. "That's Jazeel Murphy - he gonna be another one," an old coach nods sagely.

Yes, another one off the island's production line of world-beating sprinters. Is this 18 year-old going to be another Usain Bolt or Yohan Blake, you wonder aloud but then others offer you a host of different names jostling for the same accolade - Nickel Ashmeade, Dexter Lee, Oshane Bailey, Odean Skeen, Kemar Bailey-Cole, Julian Forte.

It is only a race at a high school meeting in February, the Camperdown Classic, but this is where the dream trail starts, the trail which for some all ends in a vast Olympic stadium across the other side of the world as a nation draped in green, gold and black watches joyfully transfixed.

The kids in the Camperdown come in all shapes and sizes, some kitted out like Lycra-hugged pros and some in comical old, baggy shorts and vests, but it is the vision of the sheer mass of quicksilver talent here that feels so joyous. This feels like sport that really matters, as if you are being offered a privileged glimpse of track's future.

This is a kingdom of sprints, a country where the fast kids seem as important as the great champions, where the national school track championships - known throughout the island simply as "Champs" - are their biggest single sports event of all, engendering more excitement than any Test match or football international. Nobody blinks here when Blake, the world 100?metres champion, turns out in a senior invitation race at the Camperdown after the likes of young Murphy and his mates in the school races have finished. This is the norm.

After all, only a few years ago, it was the likes of Blake, Bolt and Shelly-Ann Fraser-Pryce who were making their names in those school sprints and now the whole island is in thrall to their wonders at these Olympics.

On Sunday, in that same stadium where the kids had been strutting their stuff, thousands turned out to watch a Jamaican one-two in the men's 100m final in London's Olympic Stadium, with Bolt leading home Blake. Every one of them would tell you that if Asafa Powell hadn't injured himself it would have been the first one-nation sweep of the blue riband medals since Ralph Craig led home a US 1-2-3 at the Stockholm Games a century ago.

The previous night, they had saluted Fraser-Pryce as a repeat champion too; yes, the titles of fastest man and woman in the world were back in their proud hands.

Here were two very different heroes from two very different backgrounds; Usain, the 6ft 5in fun-loving country boy from the languid, slow lane rainforest parish of Trelawny and Shelly-Ann, the bubbly little 5ft 1in rocket who sprinted from abject poverty amid the gangstas and guns of Waterhouse, one of the world's most violent urban ghettos in Kingston.

Jamaica loves them both with a passion because here was proof again, as Fraser-Pryce told me, that "we are young and have so much fire burning for our country, we've shown something good could come from anywhere in Jamaica". Their triumphs came over the weekend when the nation was celebrating the 50th anniversary of its independence and the celebrations seemed inextricably linked; you have to see it to believe how proud Jamaicans are of their fast kids.

"You see, at the end of the day Jamaicans aren't going to be really fussy about who wins: VCB [Veronica Campbell-Brown] or Shelly-Ann, Usain or Yohan," Dr Warren Blake, the island's athletics president, had explained as he watched the youngsters at trackside. "As long as it is a Jamaican!"

Blake is overseeing one of the most astonishing modern sporting success stories, that of a small Caribbean island nation of 2.7 million souls which is still able to boast, per capita, that it is the most successful athletics nation on Earth.

It is a triumph based purely on explosive sprint prowess; 11 medals, including six golds, in the Beijing Olympics were followed by 13 medals (seven golds) at the 2009 World Championships in Berlin and nine medals (four golds) in the most recent 2011 edition in Daegu. Going into the Games, Jamaica could boast 12 of the world's 50 fastest 100m men, including six of the top 11. Britain, with a population 23 times greater, had just one man in that top 50, the teenager Adam Gemili.

All this is a source of unalloyed pride on the island, where the sprinting exploits, ever since Bolt redrew the boundaries of the art in the Beijing Games, have prompted so much fascination and so many accompanying theories about what lies behind the soaring achievements.

Blake has heard them all, whether it be the enchanting culinary explanation that Jamaicans are somehow yam or green banana-powered, or the romantic idea that every underprivileged kid wants to sprint out of poverty and become like Bolt, or just the deeply cynical view, which enrages everyone on the island, that performance-enhancing drugs have made an insidious mark there.

"You want to know the secret? Well, look around you, I think you're seeing it here," says Blake, with a sweep of his arms. "Every week after the season starts in January, there are at least two meets like this, with thousands of young athletes all trying to get their qualifying times for the Champs.

"In an hour, I'll be leaving this meet to watch another at the other end of the island in Montego Bay. We're a small island but you're talking of as many people here training and competing as in any of the big countries. Track is an addiction."

Bolt materialised and, more than anyone, fed that addiction. Don Quarrie, his great forerunner who won the 200m at the 1976 Montreal Olympics, is not about to deny that Bolt's exploits have changed the aspirations of thousands of kids here.

"Bolt is Bolt. The showman, the magnetic personality which makes people want to follow him," Quarrie says. "Since Beijing, the organisers of the weekly meets have seen a huge jump in the number of schoolboys and girls coming out to train and I think there are many, inspired by the likes of Usain and Yohan, who do see track as a kind of escape." Like this youngster Murphy. After his dazzling win, the boy who was the world's fastest 17-year-old last year tells me how he dreams one day of emulating Bolt and Blake, the heroes who currently tease him gently.

"They say 'little fat boy' and stuff but in a friendly way. I'm used to it," he shrugs with a big smile. And now this puppy is starting to shed the fat, use weights and receive a little tutelage from Glen Mills, the great coach who guides Bolt and Blake and once mentored Murphy's dad too, he may soon be no laughing matter to his elders.

"It was tough for me as a kid. My parents never had anything," says Murphy, thanking of the poverty of his childhood in St Catherine. "I want to do well in track to give them back something." It is funny that Blake had told me something similar the day before - "I wanted a better life to help my family" - and he has now set up a foundation to help open up more athletic opportunities for youngsters from impoverished backgrounds.

"Talent is not found by chance here any more," Blake says. "If you have any running talent, it's reached the stage now in Jamaica that you are going to be found."

National competitions begin for children as young as six and the best are enrolled on scholarships at schools with specialist coaches, some of whom have themselves been expertly schooled at the GC Foster College. No longer too do the best athletes have to be wooed by the American college scholarship dollar; they can thrive at home.

Blake knows that with success comes inevitable cynicism, perhaps understandable considering how, for the previous three years, doping controversies involving some of the nation's most high-profile runners have overshadowed the build-up to championships.

Before Beijing, Julien Dunkley tested positive and had to be withdrawn from the team while the following year, five sprinters, including Blake, had to serve a three-month ban after testing positive for a stimulant which, it was accepted, had been ingested innocently in a nutritional supplement and was not even on the banned list.

Fraser-Pryce also served a six-month ban after testing positive but it has been generally accepted that taking medication to treat toothache in 2010 was an accidental and minor violation. In November, more alarmingly, the US-based Steve Mullings was given a life ban for a second test failure. But Blake is adamant that there is no doping problem here.

"Yes, we have caught drug cheats in the past but, by and large, the offenders have been athletes training overseas. Unfortunately, there's a tendency when you're doing well for people to look for the worst case scenario and point fingers.

"But look around you here and you can understand. People run. People enjoy running. I'd spend hours training when I was a boy and I still run, a year away from my 60th birthday! Today I ran 5km before I came here. When I see a boy like Jazeel coming through, running so brilliantly, it still gives the same thrill, just like seeing a Jamaican man or woman on the Olympic podium. You see, this is not just our pleasure, it's a way of life."