Who writes your scripts? Well, clearly not Netflix anyway. On a sodden, puddle-ridden night at the Paris Olympics a star was born. Just not, perhaps, the one most people were expecting.
What a lovely, deliciously unplanned and unstaged moment this was in the rain of Saint Denis. Instead of Sha’Carri Richardson, flat-out favourite and star of the current big budget track and field-ommercial running on a streaming behemoth near you, it was 23-year-old Julien Alfred of St Lucia who found herself skating out across the purple track ahead of the field and running into track and field history.
St Lucia had never previously won an Olympic gold medal. St Lucia had also never previously won silver or bronze. It is the most lovely of Caribbean islands with a population of just under 200,000 and a proud sporting history in the more sedentary charms of cricket (Alfred went to the same primary school as West Indies’ top order biffer Johnson Charles).
Perhaps the best part of her gold here was that this didn’t feel like an underdog victory or a scramble across the line. It was instead the most majestically commanding of runs, teed up in the heats by a fearsome display of power in reserve from the lane next to Richardson.
The variable here was the rain. From about an hour before the start it basically chucked it down, a mist of thick, heavy drops leaving puddles into which even more huge endless drops fell. Who was this good for? Probably not Richardson who basically didn’t need any unexpected elements in a race like this.
Nobody started that well. Alfred’s start was good enough, a platform from which to drive. She has wonderful technique in her acceleration phase, all straight lines and perfect symmetry, every pound of pressure exerted in the same forward process. At around 40 metres there was one of those moments where the day seems to stretch, time collapses a little, and everyone watching can feel the moment happening.
From there she just seemed to be running on something smoother and more giving, finding more as she crossed the line and just kept running, weeping in the rain, wrapping herself in the light blue flag. This is stellar company to be joining, just the fifth woman to win an Olympic 100m gold since Florence Griffith Joyner.
Shelly-Ann Fraser-Pryce, the greatest of them all, surely won’t be back for another Games. But we have a new star now. Alfred is 23, Richardson 24. They lit up a night that was always pencilled in as a central peg in the spectacle of these Games.
One of the key tasks of Paris 2024 is to re-establish the Olympics as a source of those big, A-list reverb-heavy moments, to recreate that feeling of a place and time. It it is also part of the beauty of sport that it refuses to conform, that it will keep writing its own stories. We got our moment here, and in an excellent plot twist, it came from St Lucia.
It is also worth showering a little stardust at this point on Richardson’s silver. This is an athlete who has already had to negotiate a career’s worth of obstacles and toxic noises off; who is entirely unafraid of the spectacle, uplifting in the way she operates as a self-propelling force: all talent, all show and fun.
In the event Richardson at least made it to the start line. Shericka Jackson had already pulled out of the 100m with an injury. There was further deflation at the sight of Fraser-Pryce wandering away from the warm-ups earlier in the day. Perhaps Richardson’s failure to take gold in their absence will even be portrayed by some as failure. But elite sport doesn’t work like that.
Richardson had come here not just as the fastest woman this year and world champion, but with the sense of talent waiting to detonate, a kind of destiny in play. Olympic sport, American sport has an insatiable hunger for stars, one that the Games have always fed. But even in the heats she looked tight, nervous and a little constrained, oddly for such a wonderfully expansive competitor.
The world No 1 had a terrible start in the final, had to settle and force herself to relax and find that familiar surge. It was messy and wet, an awkward race. But she dug out that silver ahead of her fellow American Melissa Jefferson.
And Richardson will be hugely proud of the moment. She is a far more nuanced character than some would have you believe. Her story is all about graft and talent, a Texas native from really tough beginnings, who has already had to process missing one Olympics after being banned for consuming cannabis shortly after the death of her estranged birth mother (cannabis as a performance aid is certainly an interesting idea, one that might make for an excellent comedy TV documentary in its own right).
Alfred and Richardson have something in common in one respect. Both are outsiders in their own way. Both will carry the sport forward from here. This was a moment for St Lucia, for a breakthrough gold at the end of a wonderful, exhilarating run. And after the deathliness of Tokyo the Games got to have one of its vivid big-ticket snapshots in time, on a night for winners present and future.
