KINGSTON (AFP) - Asafa Powell insisted Monday that the Jamaican Athletics Championships are about qualifying for the Beijing Olympics, not a showdown with newly-minted 100m world record-holder Usain Bolt.

"I am not going there to put on any show, because you have Bolt who is running 9.7, and other guys running (good)," Powell said.

"I just want to make the team, that's all I want to do ... that's all I am going there to do, make the team," he said.

Bolt, who considers himself a 200m specialist, electrified the athletics world when he clocked 9.72sec on May 30 to eclipse Powell's previous 100m world record of 9.74.

While the two sprinters are expected to meet for the first time at the championships, which run Friday through Sunday at National Stadium, both have tried to downplay talk of a "showdown."

"I don't think it will be a showdown," Bolt said. "I just think Asafa and I will just be going out there to make the team to Beijing. I don't think we are going out there to prove anything.

"That's how I will be looking at it, I don't know how Asafa will be looking at it," Bolt said a day after his world record run in New York.

Powell's Olympic preparations have been slowed by injury.

After missing three months with a chest injury, he won a 100m semi-final heat on Saturday at the Trinidad and Tobago trials with a time of 9.96sec.

"I just went out there to try and put myself back in the game," he said. "I did a pretty good time, very impressive for the first race."