BLAKE Jerome

General
MOVING TO CANADA
In 2013 he and his younger brother travelled from Buff Bay, Jamaica, to visit their mother who was living in Kelowna, BC, Canada. The visit was supposed to be a vacation, but in the end the family chose to stay together in Canada. In 2018 he was granted Canadian citizenship. (jeromeblake.ca, 01 Sep 2020; olympic.ca, 01 Sep 2019; thestar.com, 17 Oct 2019)

EARLY DAYS
In 2013, two weeks after attending his first training session at Okanagan Athletics Club, he competed in sprint for the first time at the British Columbia Athletics Track and Field Jamboree in Kamloops. "I ended up coming almost last in all of my heats for the 100m, 200m and 400m, and ran 11.52 or something for the 100m, and I left that weekend telling myself that was it, I was done with track and field for good." However, in his first race of 2014, at a high school athletics championship, he won the 100m with a time of 11 seconds flat. "At that point Pat said to me, 'Once you break 11 seconds there's no going back', and that's when I really started to think that I could do something special." (bclocalnews.com, 19 Jan 2015)

OTHER ACTIVITIES
He is the co-founder and president of StepInStone. He runs the athlete mentoring and networking service with fellow Canadian athletes Wilfred Sam-King, Benjamin Ayesu-Attah, and Alhaji Mansaray. (stepinstone.ca, 01 Mar 2021)