Edmonton to Kingston

When Usain Bolt crossed the finish line of the 100 metres at the Olympic Stadium in Stratford on the evening of 5 August 2012, the Jamaican community across Britain was not simply watching a sporting event. They were watching something that would be impossible to fully explain to those who had not lived the particular experience of being Jamaican in Britain

Briefing

• Usain Bolt wins 100m, 200m and 4x100m relay at London Olympics; triple gold.
• Jamaica’s women dominate sprints; Shelly-Ann Fraser-Pryce defends 100m title.
• London diaspora communities gather publicly to watch; sense of shared pride unprecedented.
• UK Home Office begins expanding immigration checks to landlords and employers.
• Jamaica Independence Day, August 6, coincides with Olympic schedule; dual celebration.

The London 2012 Olympic Games were, by any measure, a moment of national pride for Britain. The opening ceremony, directed by Danny Boyle, was celebrated internationally. The British team performed better than at any modern Games on home soil. The infrastructure of the Olympic Park in Stratford, east London, was praised by observers from around the world. And in the middle of all of this, Jamaica’s sprint team arrived and did something that those who were paying attention had been anticipating for years, but which, when it actually happened, still felt extraordinary.

Usain Bolt won the 100 metres in a time of 9.63 seconds, breaking the Olympic record. He won the 200 metres two days later. He anchored the 4×100 metres relay team to another gold medal and another world record. Shelly-Ann Fraser-Pryce, who had won the women’s 100 metres in Beijing four years earlier, won it again in London. Veronica Campbell-Brown won the women’s 200 metres. Warren Weir took silver behind Bolt in the 200 metres. Yohan Blake, Bolt’s training partner and closest challenger, took silver in both individual sprints and gold in the relay. By the end of the athletics programme, Jamaica had accumulated a collection of sprint medals that made the Jamaican flag more visible on the medals board than the flags of nations with many times the population and many times the national sports budget.

What the Olympics Meant in Edmonton

Edmonton, in the north of the London Borough of Enfield, has one of the larger concentrations of Jamaican and Caribbean heritage residents in north London. It is not a wealthy area. The high street has the character of many north London high streets: a mixture of chain shops, independent businesses, betting shops, and the kind of small restaurants that serve the community rather than the tourist trade. It is, in other words, an ordinary part of working-class north London that happens to have a significant Jamaican-heritage population whose roots in the area go back to the 1950s and 1960s.

In August 2012, Edmonton’s Caribbean community watched the Olympics with an intensity that was particular. There is a specific experience of being from a small nation that is rarely, in the ordinary course of events, visible to the wider world. Jamaica has a population of fewer than three million people. It is not a global power. Its influence on the world — through music, through culture, through the lives of its diaspora — is disproportionate to its size, but it is not the kind of influence that registers consistently on the dashboards of mainstream British media. For most of the year, most years, Jamaica is invisible in the British news. And then, every four years, it arrives on the track of the Olympic stadium and becomes the most talked-about place on earth.

Independence Day in an Olympic Summer

Jamaica’s Independence Day fell on 6 August 2012, in the middle of the athletics programme. The coincidence was not lost on the community. Jamaica had been independent for fifty years. The fiftieth anniversary had already been marked with a series of events and initiatives throughout the year. But the Jamaican athletes’ performance at the Olympic Games gave the anniversary a context that no planned celebration could have engineered. The nation that had sent its working people to Britain in the decades after independence was now sending its athletes to the Olympic Games hosted by Britain and winning in the most visible way possible.

The relationship between Jamaica and Britain is a long one, and its complexity does not resolve in moments of sporting triumph. But those moments do something. They make the community visible in a way that it is not, usually, visible. They give the community something to speak about openly and proudly in workplaces and schools and shops where the ordinary discourse of being Jamaican in Britain is conducted at a lower register. In the summer of 2012, the Jamaican diaspora in Britain did not need to explain itself. It was, for a few weeks, entirely self-evident.

The Immigration Context of 2012

The summer of Olympic celebration took place against a policy background that was less celebratory. Theresa May’s Home Office was developing what would become known as the hostile environment: a systematic approach to making life in Britain more difficult for those without documentation or leave to remain. In July 2012, changes to the Immigration Rules had tightened the requirements for family visas, raising income thresholds and reducing the categories of family member who could be sponsored. The changes disproportionately affected working-class communities, including Caribbean-heritage communities, where the pattern of family reunion and transnational family life was often at odds with the paperwork requirements of British immigration law.

The community organisations that worked on immigration cases were, in 2012, dealing with a rising caseload. Long-settled Caribbean residents were struggling to navigate documentation requirements. The Equality and Human Rights Commission had published research on the disproportionate impact of immigration enforcement on Black communities. These were not the stories that were being told during the Olympic Games. They were the stories that were being told before the Games started and after the Games ended, in the community centres and advice agencies of Edmonton and Brixton and Handsworth.

The Long Distance Between the Track and the Policy Office

The Olympic Games of 2012 produced a moment of visibility for the Jamaican community in Britain that was, while it lasted, genuinely significant. The Jamaican sprint team’s performance was not simply a sporting achievement; it was a cultural assertion, a proof of the scale of what a small island nation could accomplish, and a reminder to the British public — in the most public possible forum — of Jamaica’s presence and importance. For the diaspora communities of Edmonton and Tottenham and Shepherd’s Bush, the Olympics were an experience of being seen.

What followed the Games was the ordinary life of the community: work, family, church, the management of a relationship with Britain that was ongoing and complicated and not resolved by the events of a single summer. The immigration rules that had been tightened in July remained tightened after August. The advice organisations remained busy. The documentation problems of long-settled Caribbean residents remained unresolved. The Olympic summer was real, and it mattered. But the distance between the track at the Olympic Stadium in Stratford and the policy offices of the Home Office in Westminster was, in the summer of 2012, very long indeed.