USAINBOLT.com ON SALE? SUCH A SHAME.THEN AGAIN I JUST BOUGHT HERBMCKINLEY.COM

Usain Bolt has brands such as Puma and Sandals in his camp, he is also a globally trademarked brand and yet his managers missed the US$10 per domain opportunity to register his usainbolt.com brand online? Come on! How coud his handlers be so shortsighted and sloppy to have let this happen.


How could they have missed protecting Usain Bolt’s domain name and also his brand in Facebook (There are 2 Facebook FanPages with a combined fanbase of 180,000, but which one is the Official Fan Page from those who are managing Usain Bolt’s brand?) And the same goes for AsafaPowell, Veronica Campbell and other Jamaican athletes.

In my mind, this is just another example of how we Jamaicans and Caribbean nationals do not take our own Jamaican and Caribbean brands as seriously as we should, unless someone is trying to sell it back to us. This also highlights the general mindset and that particularly of a lot of Jamaican and Caribbean companies, that are yet to take the Internet as a serious communications and marketing tool. Most of them have done little if nothing at all about going online in meaningful and powerful ways.

It is oh so sweet that JIPO is moving to block the sale of the domain name of Jamaican athletes, but again this is us,Jamaica, the Caribbean being reactive, when we should have been proactive. Maybe this issue with JIPO moving to block the sale of the athletes domain by a US-based company will help Jamaican people and Jamaican companies take their domain names, their priceless online real estate more seriously and in tow, Jamaican and Caribbean companies to realize and act on a few important things:

-Brand Jamaica is a powerful global brand and we’re behind in positioning ourselves to maximize on this. Jamaican and Caribbean people at home and in the Diaspora are online BIG TIME and they are pouring on at an alarming speed. They are an amazingly lucrative niche market with loads of untapped potential.

- Jamaican and Caribbean domain names for people, products and brands are super valuable and should be owned by the rightful individuals. So if you fall into that category, go register it at godaddy.com or networksolutions.com and stop procrastinating.

Domain names of past Jamaican Olympians of value too

It’s great that Jamaica’s current crop of Olympians are hot but what of our past Olympic Champions such as Grace Jackson(200m silver medalist, 1988 Seoul Olympics); Merlene Ottey (Dubbed Queen of the Track because among other things Ottey was the first female Caribbean athlete to win an Olympic medal and has won more Olympic medals than any other female athlete in the Western Hemisphere); Juliet Cuthbert(5 time Olympian, Double Silver Medal Winner, executive personal trainer and fitness entrepreneur) and then the legend Herb McKinley/McKenley ( He is still the only athlete to have reached an Olympic track final in all three of the classic sprint events, 100, 200 and 400 metres. His Olympic medal total of one gold and three silver.)

In fact, when I checked godaddy.com, I found that merleneottey.com was registered 3 years ago but no site has been developed as yet; Juliet Cuthbert a good friend of mine I registered her domain for her just last year but no site has been developed as yet. Herbmckinley and herbmckenley.com were available so I registered and will be hand them over to the rightful owners.

The only lesson here: Domain names are Internet real estate gold. Get yours and protect it.

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Jamaican Evolution - Paul Rodgers investigates if evolution might explain Jamaican athletes' impressive performance at the Olympic games

Paul Rodgers investigates if evolution might explain Jamaican athletes' impressive performance at the Olympic games

“Are we seeing evolution at work?” asked a colleague as the Beijing Olympics came to a close last month. I was stunned, but he had evidence: Usain Bolt’s 9.69 second 100m dash, no less. So superior was Bolt that he didn’t even tax his abilities to the limit while setting this new world record; he began to showboat as he neared the finish line, contemptuous of his rivals’ attempts to catch him. Was this not clear evidence of the emergence of Homo supernus, a species superior to mere H sapiens?

Bolt wasn’t alone. The tiny nation of Jamaica – with a population of 2.8 million, less than that of Wales – won 11 medals in Beijing, six gold, three silver and two bronze, all of them in athletics. It ended up 13th in the medal rankings, well ahead of bigger, richer countries. Nor was the success of Jamaica’s 2008 team unprecedented. In the 100m alone, it claimed silvers in 1952, 1968, 1976 and 1996, plus bronzes in 1972, 1984, 2000 and 2004.

And the statistics are misleading; several recent winners for other countries were in fact reflagged Jamaicans. Linford Christie, who won gold in Barcelona, was running for Britain, while Donovan Bailey represented Canada when he won in Atlanta, as did Ben Johnson, who was stripped of his victory in Seoul after failing a drugs test.

It’s an impressive record, but not nearly enough to show evolution at work. Complex behaviours such as running are governed by a host of genes influencing everything from the size and shape of bones to the microscopic structure of muscles and the efficiency of oxygen-carrying molecules in the blood.

To argue that the success of Jamaica’s athletics team was down to better genes, you would have to show that a new mutation emerging on the island in the past 500 years (assuming that the pre-Columbian Arawak and Taino were exterminated) conferred such a speed advantage that it drowned out other factors, both genetic and environmental.

And as if on cue, just such a mutation appeared in the press shortly before the Games opened in Beijing. Professor Errol Morrison, the president of Jamaica’s University of Technology, and a team from Glasgow University have found that Jamaica’s elite athletes had a particularly high incidence of a protein called α-actinin-3 (misnamed “actinin a” in most reports), which is produced by a gene called ACTN3 and has been linked to explosive releases of power in fast-twitch muscles. Of the Jamaican athletes studied by Morrison and his colleagues, 70 per cent had the gene for α-actinen-3, compared with just 30 per cent of Australians. This, it was claimed, was the genetic root of Jamaican’s superiority on the track. As The Daily Mail said on 6 August, it determines “whether humans are sprinters or plodders”.

Except that it doesn’t. Daniel MacArthur, a researcher at the Institute for Neuromuscular Research in Australia and member of the team that first linked the gene with elite athletes, notes that everyone has the ACTN3 gene, in one of two forms. As often happens, one of these forms is dominant, resulting in the production of α-actinin-3, the other recessive. People with a double dose of the recessive gene produce no α-actinen-3, produce less explosive power in their fast twitch muscles and are, not surprisingly, under represented among athletes the world over, since the difference in performance has been estimated at 2 to 3 per cent.

But a double dose of the dominant gene confers no special advantage. And when you count the people with one dominant and one recessive version of the gene as well as those with the double dominant version, the disparity between Jamaica and the rest of the world starts to disappear. Of Jamaicans, 98 per cent have at least one dominant version of the gene, compared to 82 per cent among Europeans. Around the world, an estimated 5 billion people have at least one copy of the dominant gene. It’s a fair bet that every runner at the Olympics had the dominant version of ACTN3.

Lots of other explanations have been put forward for the Jamaican team’s success, ranging from yams in the diet (as suggested by Bolt’s father) to the long distances that many Jamaican children run to get to school. Perhaps most significant though is the cultural importance of the track. Just as young British athletes are attracted by football and young Americans by basketball and baseball, Jamaicans have their own favourite sport, athletics. The Champs, the annual high-school athletics meet, is the country’s top sporting event. And for the past 30 years, the elite from those trials have gone on to Professor Morrison’s Utech, where their skills have been further honed.

Chances are, this is no more evidence of evolution than the lottery-backed success of Britain’s 2008 Olympic team

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Hundreds expected to welcome Bolt home

Monday, September 08, 2008

Bolt... will ride in new red BMW convertible.

TRIPLE world record holder and Olympic Champion Usain Bolt, who arrives home to a hero's welcome this afternoon, will travel in a motorcade from the Norman Manley International Airport, Kingston, to the Jamaica Pegasus hotel in New Kingston.

The Government yesterday announced that a welcome party consisting of Prime Minister Bruce Golding, Minister of Sports Olivia Grange and Opposition Leader Portia Simpson Miller, Kingston Mayor Desmond McKenzie and heads of the Jamaica Amateur Athletic Association (JAAA), Jamaica Olympic Association (JOA), INSPORTS and the Sports Development Foundation (SDF) as well as corporate sponsor Digicel will meet Bolt on the tarmac as he steps off a Virgin Atlantic flight at 1:15 pm.

A new red BMW convertible will transport Bolt in the motorcade, leading vehicles carrying the prime minister and other officials from the airport to the hotel, where a press conference is scheduled to be held.

Bolt's welcome will launch the start of several planned activities to commence in October when all the members of Jamaica's Beijing Olympic team will return to the island on a special flight. They will lead a motorcade through the streets of Kingston, accompanied by specially designed floats and effigies of the medal winners.

"We have had short notice, but we are pulling out all the stops to make this celebration a fitting tribute to the glory our Olympic athletes have brought to Jamaica," Grange said in a release yesterday.

She added, "We want to show our pride and our gratitude to these young men and women of Jamaica, and to showcase them as role models for our youth and symbols of excellence for our entire population at home and abroad."

At the 29th Olympiad in Beijing, China last month, 22-year-old Bolt set two individual world records and shared another with the 4 x 100 Men's relay team.

He won the Men's 100m in 9.69 secs and took the 200m in 19.30 secs - the first man ever to break both the 100 and 200 world records in the same Olympics and the first since Carl Lewis of the United Sates in 1984 to win the sprint double.

In the 4 x 100, the team of Nesta Carter, Michael Frater, Bolt and Asafa Powell took the gold in a world record time of 37.10 secs.

In addition to the three world records, Jamaica set an Olympic record when Melaine Walker won the 400m hurdles for women and had a total medal haul of 11 - six gold, three silver and two bronze.

Today's motorcade will travel along the following routes:

. Depart tarmac at Norman Manley International airport - escorted through Gate 1

. Drive along departure and arrival route to exit Airport

. Travel to Harbour View roundabout

. East to Mountain View Avenue

. Left on Arthur Wint Drive

. Right on Tom Redcam Avenue

. Across traffic light on to Oxford Road

. Right on Knutsford Boulevard

. Turn into Jamaica Pegasus Hotel

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700-pound Clarendon ganja haul

published: Monday | September 8, 2008

Dwight Nelson, Gleaner Writer

Operation Kingfish put another dent in the illicit drugs-for-guns trade yesterday, hauling in more than 700lb of compressed ganja and two 45-gallon drums of fuel along the island's south coast.

A Toyota Probox motor car, loaded with the drugs, was also seized during the 3 a.m. operation in the Jackson Bay area of Portland Cottage, Clarendon.

According to police reports, on arrival near the Jackson Bay Gun Club, a man on a go-fast boat and others on the beach fired on law enforcement officers, including members of the Area Three Flying Squad. The boater was shot and injured by the cops. The others fled the scene.

The injured man was taken to the Lionel Town Hospital where he succumbed to his injuries. The police have withheld his name pending further investigations.

Well known

The police said the driver of the Probox motor car is well known to them and was yesterday being sought for questioning.

"This is part of the drugs-for-guns trade with criminals in Jamaica and their counterparts in Haiti and other Caribbean territories," said Detective Sergeant Jubert Llewellyn, spokesman for Operation Kingfish.

He added: "We will be continuing operations of this nature to ensure that the drugs and guns, as well as wanted men, are removed from the streets as well as the communities."

The police have called on residents of communities plagued by drug-running to partner with them in flushing out criminals.

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