Shelly Ann Fraser

Looks like in 2008, she really got serious about track and field and started working hard towards that goal. The times reflect that.

I see nothing wrong regarding her progression. Pretty normal I'd say.

Maybe in 2009 she'll focus even more and run 10.44. Remember that drug cheat Jones that was destroying everyone? I'm not sure if she would have made the Jamaican team.

she's only 21 years old! how fast did you expect her to be back in 2004?

clarksonxc just said exactly what I was gonna say

Almost no improvement from age 16-18, to a full second of improvement from age 19-21, going from mediocre D1 level to Olympic gold. I'd say the OP has a point.

If she was from the U.S. there would be cries of doping ringing off the rafters.

Tell us about US gold meddalist discus thrower, Stephanie Brown-Trafton. What do you experts think about her progression. Where was she ranked in the world last year?

I like the little girls BRACES...

she is fine, if she is not married yet i would wife her.

She was good enough to compete in Athens in '04. Her PB from then would easily win NCAA D1. Fraser wouldn't have even been in the top 100 D1 two years ago.

discthem wrote:

Tell us about US gold meddalist discus thrower, Stephanie Brown-Trafton. What do you experts think about her progression. Where was she ranked in the world last year?

I see you did not answer the question. Here are the 2007 rankings:

http://www.iaaf.org/statistics/toplists/inout=O/age=N/season=2007/sex=W/all=n/legal=A/disc=DT/detail.html

You've got to scroll down quite a bit to find her.

And the next year she is the olympic champ? How is this more plausible than what Fraser has done? Or do we simple apply a different standard depending on the nationality of the athlete involved?

You are kidding right. It is two totally different things. Brown was ranked sixth in the field coming in so it was a surprise that she won however she was 1.5 meters off her pr which means that eveyone else just threw worse. Fraser destroyed the entire field inlcuding two others that ran sub 11. One wins by default and the other improves a huge amount in one season to win gold. I love to watch athletes run fast times, but when was the last time one country swept the 100 at the Olympics? Last years World champ from Jamaica didn't even make their team. And only Stewart was in he final of the top three this year and she ran 11.12. These are suspicious marks for sure and then you add in what Bolt is doing and Powell over the last couple of years (accept in the big meets when he knows he will be tested) and it is very fishy. Don't get me wrong I know the US is doping as much as anyone else but we take our share of accusations along with it and nobody seems to be accusing the Jamaicans of anything.

Brown was ranked 27th last year and Fraser 65th. So both had to make huge strides the difference is that Fraser's time this year would rank .11 ahead of last years number one. And Brown's mark from Beijing would have ranked only 11th in the world last year. Which one is making the huge jump that should merit suspicion

" but when was the last time one country swept the 100 at the Olympics? Last years World champ from Jamaica didn't even make their team."

Kenya sweeps the steeple in a major championship. Everybody is fine with that nowadays, but it was not always the case that they were so dominant.

Africnas dominate the 5k, 10K & marathon for men at major championships and everyone understands, but it was not always the case. Before Kip Keino, and Abebe Bikila, what had the Africans done at the Olympics in distances.

Americans sweep the 400H today, and that's fine.

Jamaican's have been showing signs for a long, long time. Linford Christie, Donovan Bailey, Don Quarrie, Ray Stewart, Merlene Ottey, Grace Jackson, Sandie Richards, Sandra Farmer-Patrick. All born in Jamaica. So finally they get it all together across the board and the idiots reaction is to accuse.

They are getting it done across the board. Look at the results of all events up to 800m. The greatest success is in the sahort sprints, but Jamaica is placing multiple finalists in several events. The fact that the defending world champ cannot make the team speaks to the depth of talent that exists in the country. Have you ever been to the Penn Relays? Have you not seen what Jamaican athletes have been doing at the high school levle for a LONG, LONG time now? Padgett did not make the US team in the open 100 this year. Does that mean Gay, Patton & Dix cheated?

To the uneducated masses, it may appear as if this rise of jamaica has taken place overnight, but to those who bothered to do a little bit of research (for example the people at the NYTimes, CSMonitor, UK Guardian), what you're seeing unfolding was only a matter of time. Might some of them be cheating, sure? Are they necessarily cheating just because a bunch of people who know very little about anything outside of their own shores didn't think they were capable of such performances? No!

If you'd really like to be able to be an ambassador for your sport when your coworkers begin to run their mouths about things they don't understand, do yourself a favor, and educate yourself a little bit:

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http://www.guardian.co.uk/sport/2008/aug/18/olympics2008.olympicsathletics?gusrc=rss&feed=sport

The Bird's Nest held its breath on Saturday as Usain Bolt rewrote the sprinting rule-book and broke his own world record in the 100m final, but only when his samples have been returned marked "negative" from the laboratory to which they were taken under armed guard will anyone exhale with relief.

No one among the 91,000 in the stadium who watched the Jamaican streak into history wants to believe that what they saw was anything other than the product of precocious talent and hard work. But in a Games that has seen fake fans, fake singers and fake fireworks, questions will be asked as to whether the most eye-catching results are also artificially enhanced.

The sprinter was not the only athlete labouring under the weight of scepticism at the weekend. The world's best swimmers - including the double gold medallist Rebecca Adlington, who broke one of 24 world records to fall in the pool - and Britain's cyclists also find themselves facing cynicism. Drugs have corroded confidence to the point that exceptional athletes, the very people the Olympics are intended to celebrate, now face the impossible task of proving a negative to put themselves beyond suspicion.

Bolt is unquestionably blessed with lavish talent and has shown consistent progression in performance since he emerged as a teenage sensation in 2001. His curse is to excel in a discipline that has been so stripped of credibility by his predecessors. His lightning dash comes 20 years after the most notorious doper of all, Ben Johnson, produced an equally devastating performance in Seoul only to be revealed as a cheat within days. Linford Christie, the 1992 champion, tested positive for steroids at the end of his career and Justin Gatlin, the man Bolt deposed as Olympic champion, was subsequently banned. Sydney's sprint-double champion Marion Jones, meanwhile, is watching the Beijing Games from jail as a result of her association with the Balco laboratory.

Before the Games began John Fahey, president of the World Anti-Doping Agency (Wada), said that Beijing needed a clean 100m to restore faith in the sport. If Bolt's sample is clean the IOC will know before he resumes his assault on the sprint double today in the first round of the 200m. Negative samples go unannounced and positives take up to 72 hours to be processed, so no news is good news.

Despite the weight of cynicism that attaches itself to sprinters, there are several reasons to have faith in what we saw on Saturday. Experienced doping observers apply four tests to establish suspicion; what the athlete does, what they say, who they associate with and their testing history. On these counts Bolt looks good enough to be true.

He has already been tested at least six times since he arrived in China, and had he failed any of these we would already know. The Jamaican team have been visited 36 times by anti-doping officials in what looks like a targeted operation aimed at sprinting's most progressive nation. Jamaican Olympic Association officials say that 20 of their athletes have been tested multiple times, including Asafa Powell.

Secondly, he has been on a consistent performance curve since 2001 when he won his high school 200m in 22.04sec aged 14 and was adopted into Jamaica's talent development programme. Sudden leaps and late-career advancement are viewed as suspicious, but Bolt has demonstrated only consistent brilliance in his career, albeit in the 200m rather than the shorter distance. Training methods for the two disciplines are broadly the same so the advances are informative.

Neither has Bolt's progress been accompanied by the whiff of impropriety as the IAAF monitors its leading athletes regularly and Bolt has been tested regularly. Finally, his feat received only praise from the athletes he left trailing in his wake. There was no one aiming daggers at him as Carl Lewis did at Johnson in 1988, instead there were only compliments. Everyone who was gripped on Saturday will hope it stays that way,

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http://www.guardian.co.uk/sport/2008/aug/17/olympics2008.olympicsathletics1

http://www.csmonitor.com/2008/0628/p01s01-woam.html

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/20/sports/olympics/20sprinters.html

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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Jamaican_athletics

Fraser just became 8th all time look at the list and make your own conclusion as to how she got there.

1- Flo-jo 10.49

2- Marion Jones 10.65

3- Christine Arron 10.73

4- Merlene Ottey 10.74

5- Evelyn Ashford 10.76

6- Irena Privalova 10.77

7- Ivet Lalova 10.77

8- Shelly Ann Fraser 10.78

Dawn Sowell 10.78

Torrie Edwards 10.78

11-Li Xuemei 10.79

At 21 years old do you think she did this naturally when most of the women on this list did not?

Obviously you did not take any time to try and educate yourself. Read the links and find out about the Univeristy of Technology if you want some answers, or just keep on throwing around accusations if you prefer.

How did Kaki get to where he is on the 800 world list? Jelimo? Every year you have new slew of Kenyan's dominating at the steeple, 1500, 3K. Does that mean they're cheating somehow. Where were the Ethiopian women stars 10 years ago. Now there are several of them. Does that mean they are cheating? There are reasons other than that someone is cheating to explain someone's success in sports. Is Ryan Hall cheating? Shalane Flannigan? Andrew Wheating? Wheating began running track 3 years ago, and now he's at the Olympics. His goal for this year was to break 1:50 and now he's run 1:45. Why don't you accuse him of cheating? Maybe because you are more familiar with his story. The fact that you're ignorant of the details of the stories of athletes other than a few in your own country does not make the succcessful others cheaters.

Yes Jamaica has had success in the past that is exactly my point. Fraser, Stewart, and Simpson are 2,3,4 in Jamaican history behind only the tainted Merlene Ottey. With their past you wouldn't think they would have the best tmes in their history all come from the same season. As for the men the next fastet man to compete for Jamaica aside from Bolt and Powell is Ray Stewart who ran only 9.96 clear back in 1991. Yes Bailey and Christie were both born in Jamaica so we can use their times also. They ran 9.84 and 9.87 respectively with Christie having a positive. How do the two fastest male athletes in the history of Jamaica happen to run their pr's only 11 months apart when only three athletes in their history are even remotely close in the last 15 years? Also only three others have ever broken 10 seconds (Frater, Carter and Spencer)in Jamaican history. So only 8 men have been under 10.0 in their history yet they have the top two ever by a very large margin. I don't know what they are using but it is very good.

Believe me I am not ignorant I did not say the Jamaican's were the only ones cheating I am just saying that for the times they are running there is very litle suspicion about their results. None of the americans you listed are anywhere near the world record in their olympic events so most would not accuse them of anything other than being great in America and average compared to the rest of the world. I had never heard of Wheating until this season but at 1:45 why would I worry about how he got there he won't make the final and probaby wont make the semi's.

Well. You seem to have already come to a conclusion about Jamaicans, so I'll leave you be, but I would like to know how you account for the rise of someone like Wheating, or Kaki, or Jelimo - now a gold medallist in her 13th or 14th race ever at the distance. Asbel Kiprop? The Kenyan woman who finished 2nd in the 800. How long has she been running the event? How about Jeff Demps the high schooler? Where did he come from all of a sudden in the 100 this year? Dwayne Evans of the USA in 1976 won a bronze medal as a 17 year old. Was he a cheat?