Jamaica's Javelin Olympian Who Ended Up Homeless

Olivia McKoy is one of Jamaica's best-known javelin throwers. According to the Jamaica Observer, she holds the national record in the event and says she represented her country for twenty years. She competed at the Olympic Games in Sydney in 2000 and in Beijing in 2008, won bronze at the 2006 Commonwealth Games and also took part in the Pan American Games and the Central American and Caribbean Championships.

Her difficulties began after her competitive years. In June 2012 she was robbed and suffered a head injury, which she said disrupted her training, and she did not make the London Olympic team. By 2013 she told the Observer that she could not pay rent and was living on the streets. She had been asked to leave a relative's home in Above Rocks, St Catherine, after a poultry business she started was taken over. She was selling bagged juice at a junction in Kingston, having started with her last 300 Jamaican dollars. She said the athletics association had supported her for about four months and then stopped.

Her son, then four, had been sleeping on the streets with her. Three months before that interview she sent him abroad to stay with a friend. She said she had sent out many job applications without success, despite experience as a pre-school and high-school teacher and in office and IT work.

In 2017 the Gleaner reported that she was in Mandeville and still without a home. She said that people had offered help but that it was temporary and she had gone back to the streets. In her own words, she had nowhere to live and no money for rent, and she and her son had managed in the parks and markets of Mandeville until things improved.

She proposed a way forward for others as well as for herself: an Olivia's Foundation, a pension plan for retired athletes, many of whom, she said, have to work full time, and support for athletes outside formal programmes, with training at Brooks Park in Mandeville.