Led by national record holder Natoya Goule, 7 Jamaican women have dipped under 2 minutes for the 800 metres. Jazmine Fray, the 2019 NCAA champion, wants to be next. Born into a New York based Jamaican family, Fray is not planning to rest on her laurels.

In her last meet for Texas University, Fray won the NCAA crown in 2 minutes 01.39 seconds which is not far from her outdoor best of 2:01.18. Now she wants to go sub-2. “That’s definitely my next target”, she said definitively last week. “My fastest time is 2:00.69 (indoors 2018) and so I really, really want to PR and break that”, asserted the 8th fastest Jamaican in history.

Her other target is Tokyo and the rescheduled Olympics. “I definitely want to make it”, the 23 year-old proposed, “and just like, kind of making sure I can make it through the rounds. It’s kind of like a mental game and I really, really want to see if I can make it to the final.”

Despite that ambition, she is looking past Tokyo as well. “You don’t want to make one race your identity. You know, there’s going to be a lot of other races. It’s going to be World Championships, other meets but don’t make it your identity and don’t make it be a be-all end-all”, she contended.

As a youngster, Fray did many other sports but she started track in the sixth grade. She made great strides at Kellenburg Memorial High School and won a scholarship to A&M where her coach was Grenada’s former World Indoor 400 metres champion Alleyne Francique. “I had a very good high school coach. He made me even better and I PRed and I have high school records there and that led me to Texas A&M and then Texas A&M led me to professional” she reviewed, “so I really think that everything in my life, I can distinctly see how God has guided me each stage of my life with the track.”

Now based in Washington DC, the Pan-Am Games team member had her plans disrupted by the COVID-19 outbreak. “After March”, she related, “everyone was like, we don’t know what’s going to happen. It’s probably over. You’re not going to need to run and so that changed my mindset, I think, and I just wasn’t as focused and I was just taking it back a notch and you’re training but you’re not really sure what you’re training for and so that was very difficult for me to grasp and that was very difficult for me to handle and then all of a sudden, like a month before, my coach was like, well, okay, races are happening and we’re going to go.”

Her best time this year of 2:04.22 does not please her. “With that being said, because I felt that I just wasn’t being focused, I ran 2:04 but I will give myself some credit and I will say, on the bright side, I wasn’t focused and still able to run 2:04 well, so I was just a little bit okay with it but I still want so much more for myself”, she resolved.

Don’t be surprised to see her run the 400 and 1500 metres occasionally. ‘I feel like the good runners have maybe more endurance and less speed or more speed and less endurance”, she observed, “but the great ones, if you want to be great, they have equal, high, top high, endurance and speed.”