EUGENE, Ore. — It doesn’t take long to appreciate the greatness of Sha’Carri Richardson. Take 10.71 seconds to watch her mow down the United States’ top female sprinters in Saturday night’s Olympic Trials 100-meter final, chest-thumping, Bolt-style, two meters before the finish line , and you get it. In sprinting, the simplest of all sports, greatness is easy to observe.
Joy? It’s also easy to see. It was written in the wide smile on Richardson’s face as she opened her arms to embrace her Star Athletics training partners. Melissa Jefferson And T-shirt T-shirt Terrywho followed Richardson across the line on Saturday and will follow her to Paris in August.
Richardson 10.71, Jefferson 10.80, Terry 10.89.
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This is your 2024 US Olympic team in the women’s 100 meters, all three coached by the same man, Dennis Mitchell.
But there’s more to the Sha’Carri Richardson of 2024 than greatness and joy. There is growth, there is understanding, there is appreciation. These qualities are harder to observe, but they explain why Richardson should compete in his first Olympics later this summer.
Richardson has held this position before, of course. Three years ago, she went wild at the COVID-delayed Olympic Trials and became the rare track and field star to go mainstream. She saw in that moment how far her talent could take her, but it would take her years to understand the burden. Success is exhilarating, but failure is the best teacher.
The lessons came quickly. Less than two weeks after winning the 2021 trials, the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency announced that Richardson’s post-race doping test tested positive for marijuana, banned in competition under the World Anti-Doping Agency’s Code (Richardson testified that she had learned about her biological mother’s death from a reporter a week before the trials and had used marijuana to cope with stress). She was stripped of her U.S. title, suspended for a month and left off the U.S. team for the Tokyo Olympics.
Photo by Kevin Morris
A year later, Richardson returned to the U.S. Championships and failed to make it out of the first round. She began to realize that she had received a rare gift and was threatening to squander it. A new Richardson has emerged in 2023, refocused, re-energized, ready to take on all comers. And after capping this season by winning the world title in Budapest with a championship record of 10.65, she entered the Olympic year of 2024 with new perspectives.
“I have gained a better understanding of myself, a deeper respect and appreciation for my gift that I have in sports as well as my responsibility to the people who believe and support me,” Richardson said. “I feel like all of these things have helped me grow and will continue to help me grow.”
On the track, Richardson is very much the same sprinter who dazzled during these trials in 2021. She has never been great coming out of the block, which was especially evident when she stumbled early in the preliminary heat of Friday. This often leaves Richardson with a gap to close in the middle of the race, but his acceleration is so vicious that it’s easy to forget there was a gap. Richardson’s start tonight was just adequate, but it was all she needed to run a world record 10.71 despite celebrating in the final meters.
Second-place Jefferson has also done its share of growth over the past two years. At the 2022 U.S. Championships, the same year Richardson exploded into the postseason, Jefferson won the U.S. title in stunning fashion despite finishing 8th at the NCAA Championships for Coastal Carolina just two weeks earlier. She signed a professional contract with Nike but lacked the structure of a professional training group and was unable to repeat her success in 2023. After running a PB of 10.82 in 2022, Jefferson did not has failed to run a legal 11.00 in any of his last 14 races. year.
That spurred a change in Mitchell’s group and a return to form for Jefferson, 23, who ran 10.94 in Gainesville in April and ran a spectacular benchmark leg to the U.S. gold medal in winning the 4 x 100 at the world relays in May before running a 10:80 p.m. this evening in Eugene.
Terry, 25, who also made the 2022 Worlds team, was only 6th in the United States last year but said training alongside Richardson and Jefferson made her stronger. They are not afraid to have difficult conversations and challenge themselves in practice. Jefferson is the better starter, which means Terry often finds himself behind when they block work together. But Terry thinks it made her a better athlete.
“Instead of being frustrated, I just ask: Well, what did you do to get this job, or how (do you) do this, how (do you) do that?” » said Terry. “In training, I train alongside these two ladies and I know she might have a good start but I know I can finish. So if I’m here on your hip, I know I’m way ahead of the pack because you’re one of the most powerful incumbents in the United States. So we rely on each other, we count on each other. We tell each other what it is, whether we want to hear it or not.
Given that Dennis Mitchell was banned for testosterone in 1998 – resulting in one of the most famous doping apologies of all time – and later admitted to being injected with HGH , not every corner of the sport will celebrate its athletes’ 1-2-3. This evening. But Mitchell’s ban was more than a quarter century ago, and he was once again welcomed by USATF (for whom he served as relay coach from 2014 to 2016) and by Nike, which channeled the best American sprinters to his training base in Florida. Its athletes have enjoyed incredible success, with Richardson and Justin Gatlin (2017) winning world titles in the 100m and Kenny Bednarek winning an Olympic silver medal in the 200m in 2021. For better or worse, he seems here to stay.
En route to Paris
Barring anything unforeseen, Richardson will be at the Paris Olympics in six weeks, where she will attempt to become the first American to win gold in the women’s 100m since Gail Devers and Atlanta 1996 (Marion Jones crossed the finish line first at Sydney 2000 but was stripped of her title for doping). Right now, it’s hard to see anyone stopping it.
Jamaica has owned this event for almost two decades, Shelly-Ann Fraser-Pryce And Elaine Thompson-Herah combining to win the last four Olympic 100m crowns. But Thompson-Herah had to be taken off the track due to injury during her final race in New York on June 9 and faces an uphill battle just to make the Jamaican team, let alone compete for gold in Paris. Meanwhile, Fraser-Pryce, 37, has only raced once in 2024 (11:15 a.m. Kingston on June 15), with the Jamaican trials scheduled to begin next week. Shericka Jackson, the Jamaican who finished 2nd behind Richardson at the 2023 Worlds, ran more frequently in 2024, but especially in the 200m, which is her best event. Jackson ran 11.03 in his only 100 of the year on May 4.
After Richardson, the second fastest woman in the world this year is from the University of Tennessee. Jaccious Sears, who ran 10.77 in April, but Sears is injured and did not compete in the U.S. Olympic Trials. World indoor 60m champion Julien-Alfred from Saint Lucia is next with 10.78, but Richardson is clearly the woman to beat.
She will head to Paris as one of the faces of the Games, three years after what was supposed to be her Olympic debut in Tokyo. But Richardson doesn’t like to look back. All maturing young adults make mistakes, but few have those mistakes magnified beyond measure by their abilities and fame. It’s not the path she would have chosen, but it’s the path she was forced to follow.
“Everything I’ve been through is everything I’ve been through to live this moment in this moment,” Richardson said. “There is nothing I have experienced that has not designed me to sit here, before you.”
For Richardson, her past is just the vehicle that got her to where she is today: the world’s greatest sprinter, with the opportunity to win her sport’s biggest race at the Stade de France in the night of August 3. is meant to be.
Post-race press conference
Results
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