The program began in the small town of May Pen, where I later grew up. It emphasized hygiene, clean water and fecal and mosquito control. The old mantras “healthy bodies, healthy minds” and “cleanliness is next to godliness” took hold in our communities and primary schools, whose teachers were recruited in the public health campaign. Running, as the cheapest sport, was the natural beneficiary of this movement. As a child, Usain Bolt received his initial training at a remote, poorly equipped rural grade school.

The result was what the historical demographer James Riley calls the Jamaican paradox: one of the rare instances of a poor country with the life expectancy of an advanced society, a health transition that began in the 1920s and improved at one of the fastest paces on record, from 36 years at birth in 1920 to 70 by 1977. It’s no accident that the oldest individual medalist in Olympic track history is a Jamaican woman, Merlene Ottey, who was still sprinting in international meets at age 52.

Yet another factor is Jamaicans’ combative individualism, the dark side of which is the country’s chronic violence. Its bright side, though, is extreme self-reliance — which, along with effective health policy, is Riley’s main explanation for the life-expectancy paradox. But it also dovetails nicely with running, in which performance is entirely up to the athlete. Jamaican track is a far cry from the British ethic of winning with grace. One Olympic medalist and alumnus of one of the dominant schools at Champs was quoted by the writer Richard Moore as telling young athletes: “One thing we go out there for, and that’s to win. To win. To win. To win. To win. To dominate. To crush them!”

The world got a taste of Jamaica’s cutthroat track culture in Beijing, where Bolt, on the verge of winning the 100 meters in record time, slowed down, thumped his chest and spread his arms in a taunting, triumphant gesture. “We are a confident people,” he later told the BBC.

This self-assuredness can lead to reckless behavior. Although Bolt has a clean slate, several Jamaican athletes have tested positive for prohibited substances. Some are no doubt guilty, and the recent disclosure that Nesta Carter tested positive for a banned substance as a result of a retest of samples from Beijing has caused consternation in Jamaica — though, to be fair, the Swiss-based Court of Arbitration for Sport has overturned or reduced penalties imposed on Jamaican runners on the grounds that there were nondoping explanations for the results. (Jamaicans have a long tradition of taking herbal supplements to promote good health.)

Jamaica has also creatively exploited its proximity to the United States. Some of our best runners went to college there on athletic scholarships, and they stayed and even competed for America, as many now do for Britain and Canada. But a critical number of them, like the world-record holders Dennis Johnson and Herb McKenley, who was also an Olympic medalist and a former Jamaican national coach, returned to train generations of new stars. Jamaican student athletes also acquired international experience by participating in American meets like the annual Penn Relays, where they frequently excel.