FEATURE
Soniya Jones: On the edge of glory
After overcoming crushing self-doubt to representing the nation on the world stage, the Antiguan sprinter now has the Olympics in her sights M any of us will have felt a sense of pride watching Antiguan sprinter Soniya Jones’ rapid-fire pelt towards the finish line in the 2026 World Indoor Athletics Championships.
plane to Poland. “He kept re-instilling in me how much better I had got in the last three years. I had to remember my ‘why’, the goals I want to achieve,” she continues, earnestly. “I had to keep all that at the front of my mind, tell myself to be resilient and keep going. There will be days when you don’t feel like showing up but then discipline shows up for you.” Racing in the 60 metres requires a special kind of resolve. The unforgiving, high-stakes event leaves no room for error; runners must give an explosive performance at maximum velocity from the very first step. As fate would have it, Soniya did not deliver the speed she needed to advance to the next heat. Her late decision to
Few will have known quite what it took her to get there. Just four months’ earlier, the 23-year-old had been suffering a crisis of confidence so pronounced she’d been on the verge of quitting athletics for good. “For several months straight I was not having good practice, my times weren’t improving, I’d been trying to overcome a chronic quad injury. I was just not in the right mental space at all,” Soniya, who is studying in the US, says. Had it not been for the steadfast belief her coach Josiah Norville displayed in her, she might never have made it on the
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