As the race beckoned, it seemed as though United States sprint star Sha’Carri Richardson had 10 seconds to make right the past three years. And if only her Olympic experience had been that absurdly demanding, perhaps she would be wearing the gold medal that lately had seemed to be her destiny.
She didn’t get 10 seconds to prove her superiority, though. The women’s 100-meter dash at the 2024 Olympic Games was decided by the time the runners had covered the length of a basketball court. Julien Alfred of the tiny Caribbean island of Saint Lucia blazed so quickly out of the starting blocks and into top speed, she’d have needed to trip over her shoelaces not to win the race.
Alfred, so magnificent at the University of Texas she was named Big 12 Athlete of the Year in 2023, won the first-ever Olympic medal for Saint Lucia, and it was the best kind.
When I covered the Olympics in Atlanta in 1996, I gathered my bags at Hartsfield International Airport, stepped onto a MARTA transport and almost immediately noticed an advertisement overhead, on the plastic panels toward the side of the train. It was from a Nike campaign geared to the Games.
“You don’t win silver. You lose gold.”
I found that harsh at the time, unnecessarily strident.
That’s what it felt like, though, watching Richardson cross the finish line Saturday.
From the time Richardson won the 100 meters at last summer’s World Championships in 10.65 seconds, through her victory at the U.S. Olympic Trials in June that was just .06 seconds off that number, through the barrage of pre-Paris television commercials in which she’d been featured, it seemed to all of America that this would be Richardson’s race.
Not, not just her race, her moment.
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It was Richardson’s chance to reimburse herself for the dreadful decision she made in advance of the Tokyo Games – a positive test for THC revealed after she’d won the 100-meter trials in 2021 – and to spectacularly scold USA Track & Field for the picayune punishment they added to her mandatory one-month suspension.
Her positive test assured she could not appear in the 100 meters in Tokyo, with the race coming so soon into the Olympic program. Even though her month of punishment lapsed in the middle of the track competition, with a chance to place her in the 4x100 relay, the nation’s governing body for the sport chose to leave her home .
Perhaps if Richardson had that Olympic experience, this one might have gone differently. Paris is the world’s most magical city, but she ran her three sprints at Stade de France as if slogging through the Seine. She did not crack the 10.87 mark in the first round, the semifinals or Saturday’s big race. If she had been able to match her time at the Trials, she would have won by the tiniest of margins.
But she would have won.
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The 100 meters may be the most unforgiving event in sports. A gymnast’s vault takes less time, but one who falters there still might win for all-around skill or as a participant in the team competition. This is one straight line that is done in half the time the CDC wants everyone to wash their hands when necessary.
Richardson appeared before the race to be aware of what was at stake. That ought to have produced the sort of focus that leads to an exceptional start, not an atypical one. Perhaps the memory of that lost Olympics added 16 100ths of a second to her burden.
Perhaps it was the rain that struck the city in advance of the race. That was the same for every runner, though. Including the one who beat Richardson.
Richardson was gracious after crossing the finish line. Indeed, she dashed more quickly to embrace and congratulate Alfred after she’d rung the track’s “victory bell” than had been the case when the starting gun was fired. And the response back home was kind, as well. There was a lot of “Sha’Carri wins silver” in the headlines and social media posts.
And yes, that’s what occurred. It’s not what happened, though. Richardson will carry this result with her a lot longer than three years.
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