After Winning US Olympic Trials, Sha’Carri Richardson Heads to Paris With New Perspective
Richardson said the last three years have granted her "a deeper respect and appreciation for my gift"
By Jonathan Gault
EUGENE, Ore. — It does not take long to appreciate the greatness of Sha’Carri Richardson. Take 10.71 seconds to watch her mow down the best female sprinters in the United States in Saturday night’s Olympic Trials 100-meter final, slapping her chest, Bolt-style, a full two meters before the finish line, and you get it. In sprinting, the simplest of all sports, greatness is easy to observe.
Joy? That’s easy to see, too. It was written in the wide smile across Richardson’s face as she threw her arms open to embrace her Star Athletics training partners Melissa Jefferson and TeeTee Terry, who followed Richardson across the line on Saturday and will follow her to Paris in August.
Richardson 10.71, Jefferson 10.80, Terry 10.89.
That’s your 2024 US Olympic team in the women’s 100 meters, all three of them coached by the same man, Dennis Mitchell.
But there is more to the Sha’Carri Richardson of 2024 than greatness and joy. There is growth, there is understanding, there is appreciation. Those qualities are harder to observe, but they explain why Richardson is set to head to her first Olympic Games later this summer.
Richardson has been in this position before, of course. Three years ago, she rampaged through the COVID-delayed Olympic Trials and became the rare track star to go mainstream. She saw in that moment how far her talent could take her, but it would take her years to understand its burden. Success is exhilirating, but failure is the best teacher.
The lessons came quickly. Less than two weeks after winning the 2021 Trials, the US Anti-Doping Agency announced that Richardson’s post-race drug test was positive for marijuana, banned in-competition under the World Anti-Doping Agency Code (Richardson said she said she had learned of the death of her biological mother from a reporter a week before the Trials and that she used marijuana as a way to cope with the stress). She was stripped of her US title, suspended for a month, and removed from the US team for the Olympics in Tokyo.
Kevin Morris photo
One year later, Richardson returned to the US championships and failed to make it out of the first round. She began to realize she had been given a rare gift and was threatening to squander it. A new Richardson emerged in 2023, refocused, rededicated, ready to take on all comers. And after she capped that season by winning the world title in Budapest in a championship record of 10.65, she turned to the Olympic year of 2024 with a new outlook.
“I’ve grown [into] a better understanding of myself, a deeper respect and appreciation for my gift that I have in the sport and as well as my responsibility to the people that believe and support me,” Richardson said. “I feel like all of those components have helped me grow and will continue to help me grow.”
On the track, Richardson is very much the same sprinter that dazzled at these Trials in 2021. She has never been great out of the blocks, something that was especially apparent as she stumbled early in Friday’s preliminary heat. That often leaves Richardson with a gap to overcome in the middle of the race, but her acceleration is so vicious, that it’s easy to forget there was a gap at all. Richardson’s start tonight was merely adequate, but that was all she needed to run a world-leading 10.71 despite celebrating in the final meters.
Jefferson in second has done her fair share of growing over the past two years as well. At the 2022 US champs, the same year Richardson bombed out in the heats, Jefferson stunningly won the US title despite finishing 8th at the NCAA championships for Coastal Carolina just two weeks earlier. She signed a professional deal with Nike but lacked the structure of a professional training group and could not repeat her success in 2023. After running a pb of 10.82 in 2022, Jefferson failed to run a wind-legal 11.00 in any of her 14 races last year.
That spurred a change to Mitchell’s group, and a return to form for Jefferson, 23, who ran 10.94 in Gainesville in April and ran a spectacular anchor leg for the US’s gold-medal winning 4 x 100 at the World Relays in May before running a 10.80 pb tonight in Eugene.
Terry, 25, who also made the Worlds team in 2022, was only 6th at USAs last year but said training alongside Richardson and Jefferson has made her stronger. They’re not afraid to have hard conversations and challenge each other in practice. Jefferson is the best starter, which means Terry often finds herself behind when they do block work together. But Terry believes that has made her a better athlete.
“Instead of getting frustrated, I just ask, well what did you do to get this position, or how [do] you do this, how [do] you do that?” Terry said. “In practice, I train alongside these two ladies and I know she may have a great start but I know I can finish. So if I’m right here on your hip, I know I’m well ahead of the field because you’re one of the most poweful starters in the US. So we just lean on each other, rely on each other. We tell each other what it is whether we want to hear it or not.”
Given Dennis Mitchell was banned for testosterone in 1998 — which spurred one of the most famous doping excuses of all time — and later admitted to being injected with HGH, not every corner of the sport will be celebrating his athletes’ 1-2-3 finish tonight. But Mitchell’s ban was more than a quarter century ago and he has been welcomed back by both USATF (for whom he served as relay coach from 2014-16) and Nike, who have funneled America’s top sprinters to his Florida training base. His athletes have experienced incredible success, with Richardson and Justin Gatlin (2017) earning 100m world titles and Kenny Bednarek claiming an Olympic silver at 200m in 2021. For better or worse, he appears here to stay.
On to Paris
Barring an unexpected turn, Richardson will be at the Olympics in Paris in six weeks’ time, where she will attempt to become the first American to win gold in the women’s 100 since Gail Devers at Atlanta 1996 (Marion Jones crossed the finish line first at Sydney 2000 but was stripped of her title for doping). Right now, it is hard to see anyone stopping her.
Jamaica has owned this event for nearly 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 carried off the track due to injury in her most recent race in New York on June 9 and faces an uphill battle just to make the Jamaican team, let alone contend for gold in Paris. Meanwhile Fraser-Pryce, 37, has raced just once in 2024 (11.15 in Kingston on June 15) with the Jamaican trials set to begin next week. Shericka Jackson, the Jamaican who finished 2nd behind Richardson at the 2023 Worlds, has been racing more frequently in 2024, but mostly in the 200, which is her better event. Jackson ran 11.03 in her only 100 of the year on May 4.
After Richardson, the next-fastest woman in the world this year is the University of Tennessee’s Jacious Sears, who ran 10.77 in April, but Sears is injured and did not contest the US Olympic Trials. World Indoor 60m champion Julien Alfred of St. Lucia is next at 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 meant to be her Olympic debut in Tokyo. But Richardson does not like to look back. All maturing young adults make mistakes, but few have those mistakes magnified beyond measure because of their ability and fame. It is not the path she would have chosen, but it is the path she has been forced to take.
“Everything I’ve been through is everything I have been through to be in this moment right now,” Richardson said. “There’s nothing I’ve been through that hasn’t designed me to sit right here in front of you.”
For Richardson, her past is merely the vehicle that took her to where she is now: the world’s greatest female sprinter, with the opportunity to win her sport’s biggest race in the Stade de France on the night of August 3. She is exactly where she is meant to be.
Post-race press conference
Results
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