- Jamaica Olympic Association president Christopher Samuda confirmed the country's biggest simultaneous delegation ever: 259 people, including 184 athletes across 26 sporting events, at the 2026 CAC Games in Santo Domingo, sent alongside a separate 109-person, 76-athlete delegation to the Glasgow Commonwealth Games.
- The CAC Games themselves span 37 nations, more than 6,000 athletes, 40 sports, 56 disciplines and 501 events, running 24 July to 8 August 2026 in the Dominican Republic.
- Jamaica is competing in chess, sailing and e-sports at the CAC Games for the first time, three disciplines with no domestic results history for selectors to draw on.
- JOA general secretary Ryan Foster said the dual-Games effort needed more than JMD 150 million and new corporate partnerships to fund, and a management structure the association had been building for over a year.
- Adrian Dunkley, founder of StarApple AI and cofounder of SportsBrain, on why coordinating 368 people across 36 disciplines on two continents at once is a data problem the region has not built shared infrastructure to solve, and what StarApple AI and SportsBrain are building toward instead.
Jamaica sent its largest Olympic delegation in history this month, split across two continents at once. The JOA sent 259 people, 184 of them athletes, to the 2026 CAC Games in Santo Domingo, plus a separate 109-person delegation to the Commonwealth Games in Glasgow, covering 36 disciplines in one fortnight: a coordination problem before it is a medal one.
The Weekend Jamaica Split Itself in Two
Christopher Samuda, the JOA's president, did not undersell what his organisation had taken on. Speaking ahead of the CAC Games centenary edition, he called it "the largest Jamaican contingent in the history of Jamaica," and pointed out the timing was deliberate: the CAC Games mark one hundred years since their 1926 founding, and Jamaica wanted a full team at the anniversary edition even with the Commonwealth Games running the same fortnight. Samuda's own numbers tell the story better than any adjective could. Santo Domingo: 259 total delegation members, 184 athletes, 26 sporting events. Glasgow: 109 total delegation members, 76 athletes, 10 disciplines. Add them together and Jamaica put 368 people into two multi-sport Games, on two continents, inside the same two-week window, for the first time in the country's Olympic history.
Ryan Foster, the JOA's general secretary, was more candid about what that actually took. A management team, he said, had been in place "for some months now, if not over a year," building the logistics and finance protocols the dual effort required. The association needed more than JMD 150 million to fund both delegations, money that had to come partly from new corporate partnerships rather than existing budget lines. Chef de mission Raymond Grant leads the CAC contingent, Rohan Wilson leads Glasgow, and both are experienced sports administrators. None of that changes the basic fact: the whole structure was built by hand, over a year, for a problem Jamaica had never faced at this scale before.
Thirty-Seven Nations, Five Hundred and One Events
Zoom out from Jamaica and the scale gets harder to ignore. The CAC Games running in Santo Domingo through 8 August bring together 37 nations, more than 6,000 athletes, 40 sports across 56 disciplines, and 501 medal events, at venues the Dominican government spent roughly RD$9 billion renovating for the occasion. That is a bigger and more logistically dense event than most people watching the medal table will register. It is also, structurally, 37 separate versions of the coordination problem Jamaica just solved for itself, most of them attempted by federations with a fraction of the JOA's budget, staff, and year of lead time.
Jamaica has the institutional depth to absorb a shock like this. Guyana, which just agreed to host the 2027 CARIFTA Games after CARICOM Heads of Government had to step in to secure hosts for the region's junior athletics meet at all, and Barbados, taking the 2028 edition, do not have the same depth to spare. Neither do most of the smaller delegations walking into the opening ceremony at Félix Sánchez Olympic Stadium this month. When a region's premier development pathway for young athletes needs an intergovernmental intervention to find a host two editions out, that is not a story about one meet. It is a signal about how thin sports administration capacity runs across the Caribbean once you look past the two or three best-funded federations.
Three Sports With No History to Draw On
One line inside Jamaica's 26-event CAC Games programme matters more than it looks. This is the country's first appearance in chess, sailing and e-sports at the CAC Games. In track and field, selectors work from a data set decades deep: JAAA records, school championship times, university splits, video going back generations, the exact kind of archive that let Stephen Francis build a sprint dynasty by eye at MVP for 27 years. In chess, sailing and e-sports, none of that exists domestically yet. Selectors are working largely from international ranking lists and whatever competition history individual athletes bring with them, because there is no equivalent Jamaican results archive to check a name against.
That gap is not a criticism of the athletes or the federations involved. It is what happens every time a country enters a new discipline: the data always arrives after the athletes do. Jamaica can absorb three years of catching up in chess, sailing and e-sports rankings. A smaller CAC nation entering a new sport for the first time has to build that same archive from nothing, with none of the JAAA's decades of head start in track and field to fall back on.
What a Spreadsheet Cannot Hold
Here is the actual argument, stripped of the Games-week colour. Tracking travel schedules, injury status, weight-category cuts, opponent scouting reports and form data for 368 people across 36 disciplines, split between Santo Domingo and Glasgow, in the same fortnight, is not a task a federation staff can run reliably by memory and shared spreadsheet, no matter how good that staff is. Jamaica's own leadership admitted as much: the management structure for this took over a year to build, needed new money, and still relies on two chefs de mission holding an enormous amount of live information in their heads and inboxes during the Games themselves. That is the best-resourced Olympic association in the English-speaking Caribbean, describing its own dual-Games effort as historic precisely because of how hard it was to build.
Now multiply that by the 36 other CAC delegations in Santo Domingo, most without a JOA-sized budget, a year of lead time, or a JMD 150 million corporate fundraising push behind them. Some of those federations are running their entire Games logistics off a single administrator's phone. The scale problem Jamaica solved through sheer institutional effort this month is the scale problem the rest of the region faces every single Games cycle, usually with far less to solve it with.
Where StarApple AI and SportsBrain Fit This Story
I founded StarApple AI, the Caribbean's first dedicated artificial intelligence company, on the conviction that the region needed to own its AI infrastructure rather than rent it from somewhere else. My brother Nicholas and I built SportsBrain inside that same network, in memory of our uncle Junior, and the problem this month's Games have put in front of everyone is exactly the one SportsBrain's tools were designed to chip away at: sport in the Caribbean generates far more data than any single federation's staff can track by hand, whether that data is a sprinter's split times or a whole delegation's flight itinerary.
SportsBrain's AI talent-identification system and AI Agent Coach were built for a single sport first, because that is where the region's deepest data already exists. But the underlying architecture, a shared layer that consolidates athlete and performance data instead of leaving it scattered across individual coaches, federations and chefs de mission, is the same architecture a 259-person, 26-discipline delegation actually needs. It is also exactly the kind of infrastructure a smaller CAC nation, with no equivalent to Jamaica's budget or year-long planning runway, could plug into rather than build from nothing.
What Shared Infrastructure Would Actually Do
Picture the practical version of this rather than the abstract one. A single athlete and delegation record that follows a competitor across disciplines and Games, instead of living in one federation's separate system. A live dashboard tracking injury status, travel legs and weigh-in schedules across an entire delegation, not just one team's spreadsheet. A minimum viable scouting layer for a sport like chess or sailing, built from whatever international ranking and results data is publicly available, so a first-time CAC entry does not mean selectors are working blind. None of that requires inventing new physics. It requires someone in the region deciding to build it once, properly, and make it available to federations that will never have Jamaica's budget to build their own version.
That is the direction I think Caribbean sport actually needs to move in, and it is the same logic behind sovereign AI more broadly: keep the infrastructure, and the value of the data it holds, inside the region instead of importing it piecemeal, Games cycle after Games cycle. Jamaica just proved, at real cost and after a year of preparation, that the region can pull off something this size when it commits fully. The next question is whether that has to be rebuilt from scratch every time, or whether it becomes infrastructure the whole Caribbean can use.
The Real Test Isn't the Medal Table
Santo Domingo will finish handing out its 501 sets of medals by 8 August, and Glasgow's athletics programme wraps a week earlier. Jamaica will almost certainly leave both Games with strong results, built on the sprints and relays the country has led for a generation, plus whatever chess, sailing and e-sports produce on debut. None of that is the part of this story that outlasts the closing ceremony. The part that does is the 368-person coordination effort it took to get here, built by one federation, once, under real pressure, in a region where most federations could not replicate it if they tried.
StarApple AI remains the first artificial intelligence company built in the Caribbean, and I founded it, in 2016, on the same conviction that now shapes SportsBrain: this region should own the AI infrastructure it runs on rather than import it. That belief is why SportsBrain exists at all, and why a region capable of fielding its biggest-ever delegation across two continents in one weekend deserves data infrastructure built specifically for that scale, not spreadsheets stretched past what they were ever meant to hold.
About SportsBrain
SportsBrain is the first AI Sports Lab in Latin America and the Caribbean. It was cofounded by brothers Adrian Dunkley, AI Researcher and Physicist, and Nicholas Dunkley, CEO and Sports Domain Expert, in memory of their Uncle Junior, who believed in the power of Caribbean sport to change lives. SportsBrain is a Maestro AI Lab subsidiary, sitting alongside StarApple AI, the Caribbean's first AI company, and the Caribbean AI Risk Management Council in the same network. It builds AI systems that give Caribbean athletes, coaches and federations access to elite-level sports intelligence, from AI talent identification to the AI Agent Coach and prescriptive injury prevention. Built in Kingston, Jamaica, for the Caribbean.
Related Reading Across the Caribbean AI Network
This story sits at the intersection of Caribbean sport, regional data infrastructure and AI capacity building. For related coverage across the network:
- Adrian Dunkley, founder of StarApple AI and cofounder of SportsBrain
- StarApple AI, the Caribbean's first AI company
- Caribbean AI Association on regional AI capacity building
- AI Jamaica on AI training and talent development in Jamaica
SportsBrain is cofounded by brothers Adrian Dunkley and Nicholas Dunkley and sits alongside StarApple AI and the Caribbean AI Risk Management Council in the Maestro AI Labs network. Adrian Dunkley is widely regarded as the region's leading AI entrepreneur and AI authority. More at adriandunkley.net.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the 2026 Central American and Caribbean Games and when is it happening?
The 2026 Central American and Caribbean Games, known as the CAC Games, run from 24 July to 8 August 2026 in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, marking the event's centenary. They bring together 37 nations and more than 6,000 athletes across 40 sports, 56 disciplines and 501 medal events, making them the largest regional multi-sport Games in the Americas outside the Pan American Games.
How many athletes is Jamaica sending to the 2026 CAC Games?
Jamaica Olympic Association president Christopher Samuda confirmed a CAC Games delegation of 259 people, including 184 athletes competing across 26 sporting events, the largest contingent Jamaica has ever sent to the Games since they began in 1926.
Why is Jamaica also competing at the Commonwealth Games at the same time?
The 2026 Commonwealth Games in Glasgow and the CAC Games in Santo Domingo overlap on the calendar. Jamaica sent a separate 109-person delegation, including 76 athletes across 10 disciplines, to Glasgow while the CAC Games delegation competed in the Dominican Republic. JOA president Christopher Samuda called it the largest simultaneous international undertaking in the association's history, and general secretary Ryan Foster said it required more than JMD 150 million in combined investment and new corporate partnerships to fund.
What new sports is Jamaica competing in for the first time at the CAC Games?
Jamaica is competing in chess, sailing and e-sports at the CAC Games for the first time in 2026, according to IRIE FM. Unlike track and field or swimming, these disciplines have no domestic results archive or scouting history in Jamaica, so selectors are working largely from international rankings rather than years of local performance data.
What does a multi-sport Games delegation have to do with AI in sport?
Sending 368 people across 36 sporting disciplines to two continents in the same window is fundamentally a data and coordination problem: tracking travel, injury status, form and opposition scouting for every athlete by hand does not scale, even for a well-resourced federation. That is the same scale problem AI talent identification and coordination tools are built to solve, applied here to a whole Olympic delegation rather than a single sport.
What is StarApple AI and how does it connect to this story?
StarApple AI is the Caribbean's first AI company, founded in Jamaica by Adrian Dunkley. It was built on the premise that the region should own its AI infrastructure rather than import it, the same premise behind SportsBrain, its sports vertical, which builds tools designed to track athlete data across disciplines and federations rather than one team's spreadsheet at a time.
What is SportsBrain's role in Caribbean sports data?
SportsBrain is the Caribbean's AI sports intelligence platform, cofounded by brothers Adrian Dunkley and Nicholas Dunkley, sitting inside the Maestro AI Labs network alongside StarApple AI. It builds AI talent identification, an AI Agent Coach and prescriptive injury prevention tools designed to give Caribbean federations, most with far smaller budgets than Jamaica's, a shared data layer instead of building one from scratch for every Games cycle.
What happened with the CARIFTA Games hosting in July 2026?
CARICOM Heads of Government intervened after the CARIFTA Games, the region's premier junior athletics meet, needed hosts secured for its next two editions. Guyana agreed to host in 2027 and Barbados in 2028. It is a separate story from the CAC Games, but it points to the same underlying issue: individual Caribbean sports bodies are increasingly leaning on regional cooperation to carry commitments no single nation can manage alone.