TOKYO (AP) — Sha’Carri Richardson needed time, and she got it.
Slowed since the start of the year by an injury, the nature of which she has not disclosed, track’s most charismatic, enigmatic sprinter will try to defend her 100-meter title this week at a world championships that have been pushed to the tail-end of the sport’s season.
She heads to Tokyo – the trip she missed four years ago for the Olympics after a positive test for marijuana terminated her season – not as a favorite, but rather, as a sprinter who hasn’t broken 11 seconds this year and now stands out as the sport’s biggest question mark.
Is she the sprinter who looked poised to dominate for years when she won at the U.S. Olympic trials in 2021?
Is she the sprinter who looked poised for a golden run at the Paris Olympics after winning the 100 meters at world championships in Budapest the year before?
Is she the sprinter whose first burst of fame came with that marijuana positive and who made headlines again earlier this year after being arrested following what police called a “domestic dispute” with boyfriend Christian Coleman in an airport?
Or is Richardson somewhere in between all that – a rare talent who has flaws like anyone else; the sprinter who wouldn’t talk to the press after finishing second at the Olympics last year, but returned a week later and stomped across the finish line to put an exclamation mark on a U.S. win in the 4×100 relay?
The world will get its next look at her Saturday when the heats of the 100 meters begin. She only ran that distance once at nationals – she got an automatic spot into worlds as the defending champion – where, after posting a time of 11.07, she sounded encouraged.
“Going to continue to work on that start. But when it comes to how I finish the race, definitely closing, keeping knees up to the line,” she said, as she watched a replay of the race. “I’m just happy to see this race. Take it, learn from it, train from it and get ready for Tokyo.”
While Richardson struggles, her training partner gets faster
It would be no shock to see Richardson’s training partner, the world-leading Melissa Jefferson-Wooden, win the race to set herself up as potentially the next great sprinter.
Nor would it be a surprise to see Julien Alfred, the 24-year-old sprinter out of the island country of St. Lucia, add a world title to the Olympic gold she won last year in what many viewed as an upset over Richardson.
Neither woman generates as much buzz as the 25-year-old former NCAA champion who revealed, in an interview with Essence published last December, that she has embraced therapy over recent years during which many of her triumphs and setbacks have been laid out for the public to dissect, analyze and judge.
“I don’t have to worry about the world, or being an athlete, or being a friend, or being a daughter or anything,” Richardson said. “I could go into therapy and just be me.”
Richardson opened up about how the spotlight, at times, forced her into being someone she wasn’t.
“I wasn’t happy when I wasn’t being myself,” she said. “I wasn’t happy when I was trying to listen or, I guess, take in the criticism, or defend myself from the criticism. Nothing was making me happy, because I wasn’t me. But the unhappiness is what got me back to myself.”
Richardson’s arrest adds troubling wrinkle to a complicated story
That interview came months before the injury and more than a half year before the very public confrontation with Coleman.
Police said the couple got into a domestic dispute near the TSA checkpoint at the Seattle airport, the weekend before national championships in Eugene.
A few weeks after the arrest, Richardson took to social media to offer an apology to Coleman and also to tell the world she refused “to run away but face everything that comes to me head on.”
It’s against that backdrop that Richardson will show up in Tokyo, knowing her own goals won’t necessarily involve a certain medal color but, rather, the work she’s put in to earn whatever comes.
“I’ll honestly say my definition of success was the same before and after Paris, as well as before and after the World Championships in Budapest, when I won,” she said in the Essence interview. “I would definitely say that success is just you knowing you have put the work in, to receive what it is that you have invested in.”
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AP Summer Olympics: https://apnews.com/hub/2024-paris-olympic-games
