LIMA, Peru — Team Jamaica Technical Leader David Riley says there should be some rethinking about how elite junior athletes are prepared for global international competitions.

This follows Jamaica’s participation here at the World Athletics U20 Championships last week.

Jamaica won five medals, consisting of four gold and a bronze, in the five-day meet held during the winter season.

There were 12 finalists overall as Jamaica had two fourth-place finishes, two in sixth place, two seventh-place finishes, and an eighth-place position.

“I’ve stated publicly that our system needs some tweaking, especially for our elite juniors,” Riley told the Jamaica Observer on Saturday night. “So, we have to look at it and see how can we get our training programmes organised [so] that our juniors are in their best shape when we want to race against the world — so that’s something that we have to make an adjustment to and get it done.”

The four gold medals won were tied for the second best-ever haul for Jamaica as the same number of gold medals were won in Tampere, Finland, in 2018. This is only behind the six gold medals won two years ago in Cali, Colombia.

The five medals matched the overall haul from Barcelona, Spain, in 2012 and snapped a three-championship run during which the medal haul was in the double digits — 12 in 2018; 11 in Nairobi, Kenya, in 2021; and 16 in 2022.

Kerrica Hill, who has four gold medals from the last three stagings of the World U20, became only the second athlete to defend the 100m Hurdles title, joining compatriot Gillian Russel and Alana Reid who won the Women’s 100m. Both athletes extended Jamaican’s run of winning gold medals in their respective events to three and four, respectively.

The Men’s and Women’s 4x100m Relay teams won the double for the first time while Shanoya Douglas took third in the Women’s 200m.

Riley said the weather conditions were not optimal.

“Given the conditions, we did what we could do,” he said. “The athletes had to adjust, but it was difficult to do that in the difficult conditions and [the athletes] prevailed in areas that we had significant strength in. We’re definitely better than the rest of the field there but in other events that we had to push through, they couldn’t push.”

With the exception of the relays, none of the individual athletes managed a season’s best over the five days, in what was one of the latest stagings of the event since it first debuted in 1986.

It was a good ending, however, with both sprint relay teams winning — the men in dramatic fashion with a tremendous anchor leg from Deandre Daley, which Riley said that was a plus.

The men were winning for only the third time since 1998 and 2006, snapping a run of three straight silver medals while the women made it three wins on the trot and seventh time overall.

Hill, who won back-to-back 100m gold medals after Ackera Nugent won in Nairobi, Kenya, in 2021, also had gold medals in the 4x100m relays from 2021 and 2022.

Reid, who was part of the Jamaican Women’s 4x100m Relay team at the Paris Olympics earlier in August, added two gold medals to the bronze she won in the 200m in Cali, Colombia, two years ago, extending Jamaica’s run in the Women’s 100m to four in a row from the relays.

Daley, in the Men’s 100m and the Mixed 4x400m Relays, both placed fourth; Gary Card in the Men’s 100m and Richard Hall in the 110m Hurdles were both sixth; Shaiquan Dunn, who was also a finalist in the Men’s Shot Put, was seventh in the discus throw — same position as Daniel Wright in the 400m Hurdles — while the Women’s 4x400m team placed eighth.