Unfortunately, during the funeral of Stephen ‘Franno’ Francis, I was in Shanghai on my way to Beijing, where, in 2008, Jamaican athletes painted the Bird’s Nest Stadium and the entire city in black, gold, and green.
Days before, I had been in Osaka, Japan, the first and last place Shelly-Ann Fraser-Pryce won World Athletics medals, interestingly both silver in the 4×100 metres relay.
Earlier, it was Tokyo, where she, beside Elaine Thompson-Herah and Shericka Jackson, completed a Jamaican sweep of the 100 metres medals. All three women are progenies of Franno’s MVP Track Club, which produced all-female Olympic 100 metres champions between 2008 and 2020.
Beijing beckons next year with the 2027 World Athletics Championships.
That Franno died from illness when he was a vigilant custodian of the health of his charges is a bit ironic. Although much of this is second-hand, it is reported that he oftentimes disagreed with athletes over what they felt ready to do with their own bodies.
After all, he was engaged by them to do what was right for them, not necessarily what they wanted or even what the public desired. Tough love. The Zen master’s results totally vindicate his often uncompromising image.
Looking at the recent handling of a junior athlete, Franno’s antithesis elicits a chalk-and-cheese comparison. We counted one, two, three, and four rounds as a teenager, not a Sesame Street-aged child, was allowed to do what a good father should never allow his child to do.
Franno might have been a grouch, like Oscar, but he called rubbish for what it was.
First appearing during JBC’s Schools’ Challenge Quiz, when, as sixth-formers, this fourth- or fifth-former from Age Quod Agis and Dale Abel and others showed us that they were a cut above the rest.
We at St George’s College took satisfaction that we dominated the hurdles, with the late Don Wehby and Tarn Peralto.
Had Franno merely completed his MBA in the 1980s, he would have accomplished what most of us in that decade did not.
What he did, however, was open an era not only of Jamaican athletics ascendancy but also a new portal of national pride.
Be not mistaken, as significant a landmark as the breaking of the world 100 metres record by Asafa Powell in 2005 was, it is not by itself a milestone.
Jamaicans have made world sprinting records since we touched the track in 1948. Herb McKenley did so twice in the 400 metres/440 yards with times of 46.0 seconds and later improving it to 45.9 seconds.
Dennis Johnson equalled the 100-yard world record of 9.3 seconds four times in 1961.
Donald Quarrie equalled both the 100 metres world record of 9.9 in 1976 and the 200 metres world record of 19.8 in 1971 and 1975. So, that is not new ground.
In 1999, along with his brother Paul, David Noel, and Bruce James, Franno literally ushered in a new millennium with the formation of MVP Track Club at their alma mater, Wolmer’s High School.
Kudos to Bridgette Foster-Hylton, who returned home to be Franno’s ‘guinea pig’, and Asafa, who, in my opinion, with less natural speed than his siblings, Donovan and Nigel, became his modelling clay.
We might not remember the period before 1999 very well. An overbearing indulgence in American and British imagery was at such a sickening level that it fuelled the resurgence of Rastafari in reggae and dancehall music.
Proudly calling oneself some type of ‘British’ for having spent a few years hiding as a ‘run-off’ or wearing American flags as do-rags and brandishing American handkerchiefs and bandanas was the norm. Except for Festival, Emancipation, or Heritage Week, citizens were looked at strangely for donning our national colours.
Against that background, deeply tainted by a colonial subtheme of ‘locals just not being good enough’, Franno, with his business-trained genius mind, and James, a second-generation banker whose father’s name means ‘King’, defied the odds, financiers, naysayers, and pessimists who did not believe.
Indeed, for all our production of footballers – Dago Gordon, Lindy Delapenha, Devon ‘Roots’ Lewis, and Allan ‘Skill’ Cole – it took ‘Super Mario’, Rene Simoes, a Brazilian, to take us to the World Cup. Moreover, all of the abovementioned record-setters had been trained, for at least part of their careers, in the American college system.
But Franno knew something they did not. Glen Mills, tutored by Foggy Burrowes, had coached schoolboy Raymond Stewart to sixth in the blue-riband 100 metres at the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics and to anchor the 4×100 relay team to silver, giving Quarrie his last Olympic medal.
The maths phenom, Franno, knew something that Johnson did but could not get the money people to believe. Johnson did show us the way in 1989 with the Bolts of Lightning team, based at the then College of Arts, Science and Technology. A local 4×100 team cast away all doubters and ran a historic sub-40-second relay.
When Powell brought the dream to fruition, doubtless the General, Mills, noticed. The pre-existing Racers Track Club got its second wind, and Usain Bolt entered the portal.
Trained to run with an efficiency resembling a computer-generated image, Powell had more form than customs and immigration together and is the closest thing to the perfect 100-metre sprinter in recorded history. Unlike his predecessors, he is 100 per cent home-grown, even in his language and accent.
Many can talk and run their mouths. Franno showed an entire nation and diaspora that we can move mountains.
I give God thanks to have lived in an era in which there was a Stephen Francis. Coach, rest in eternal peace, Franno.
Orville Taylor is senior lecturer at the Department of Sociology at The University of the West Indies, a radio talk-show host and author of Broken Promises, Hearts and Pockets. Send feedback to columns@gleanerjm.com and tayloronblackline@hotmail.com.
