On a charged Friday evening at Kingston’s National Stadium, newly crowned world champion Oblique Seville delivered a career-defining performance to claim his first Jamaican national 100m title, clocking a blistering 9.82 seconds with a legal 0.6 m/s tailwind that pushes him to the top of the 2025 global rankings.
Seville arrived at the Jamaica Athletics Administrative Association (JAAA) National Championships already in exceptional form, having wrapped up his semi-final heat earlier in the day with a solid 9.95-second run. That momentum carried into the final, where he left the rest of the elite field in his wake. Behind Seville, 19-year-old rising star Gary Card turned in a shockingly fast run to take second place in 9.93 seconds, a new Jamaican under-20 national record that rewrote the country’s junior record books.
Rounding out the podium was Ackeem Blake, who crossed the line third with a competitive season’s best time of 9.94 seconds, proving the depth of sprinting talent Jamaica continues to produce. Seville’s 9.82-second mark topples the previous world-leading time of 9.84 seconds set by Nigerian-American collegiate sprinter Kayinsola Ajayo, who earned that ranking after winning the NCAA Division 1 Outdoor Championships just weeks ago.
For Card, his 9.93-second run does more than just earn him a silver medal at the national level: it breaks the previous Jamaican junior record of 9.99 seconds set by Bouwahjgie Nkrumie back in 2023. It also ties him for the third-fastest under-20 100m time in history, level with American sprinter Christian Miller. To date, the global under-20 record remains held by Botswana’s sprint star Letsile Tebogo, who ran 9.91 seconds back in 2022, with American Maurice Gleaton holding the second spot with a 9.92-second run set earlier this year.
