“It just was me,” the sprinter said in May, while visiting Los Angeles, “that was standing in my way.”
This week inside Hayward Field, neither Richardson nor any of her 100-meter competitors could derail her 10.82-second path to a U.S. championship and a berth on her first world championships team — the 23-year-old dominating each of her three heats to transition from a two-year period of unpredictability into two days of utter control.
Brittany Brown (10.90) and Tamari Davis (10.99) will join Richardson on the U.S. team. A U.S. woman has not won the world outdoor 100-meter championship since the late Tori Bowie in 2017, with Jamaican Shelly-Ann Fraser-Pryce claiming the two titles since.
Richardson ripped off the orange wig to reveal braids as her name was called before Friday’s final, drawing startled cheers and laughs inside the stadium, but never cracked her unsmiling expression, then loaded into the blocks. Behind early, she powered to the championship and kept sprinting another 100 meters, pumping a fist in the air.
The talent of Richardson, a past NCAA champion, was never questioned. Her consistency was. Yet this year she has run seven 100s, and all have been sub-11 seconds. That string of races, and the way she controlled all of them in Eugene, raises the question of who will win in August’s world championships in Hungary when it becomes Richardson against the world’s best.
Richardson did not speak with reporters after her victory. She had not competed since the Los Angeles Grand Prix in late May, when she convincingly won her preliminary round, then withdrew from the final. Instead of coasting through her first-round race Thursday at the U.S. championships, she sent a message — her time of 10.71 marking a personal best and the fastest by an American woman since Carmelita Jeter ran 10.64 in 2011.
“Focused Sha’Carri is good for Sha’Carri, good for the sport, good for US team, and good for fans,” Olympic sprinter Michael Johnson wrote on Twitter late Thursday.
Richardson didn’t let up in her semifinal Friday evening by winning in 10.75. On her way to recover for the final, she tapped Mia Brahe-Pedersen and smiled as she walked by, leaving the teenager who just finished her junior year at Lake Oswego (Ore.) High beaming. They would meet again an hour later in the championship final, with Brahe-Pedersen, the first high school track athlete to sign a name, image and likeness contract with Nike, finishing seventh in 11.08.
Like Richardson, who will attempt to qualify for the 200 starting Saturday, Noah Lyles arrived in Eugene hoping to run the 100 and 200 at August’s world championships. That chance is still alive after finishing third in the 100 in 10.0 seconds to make what he called the hardest U.S. team in his career. Recovering from COVID as recently as five days ago, he had “a really bad practice on Tuesday, an OK practice on Wednesday, all of a sudden we’re racing on Thursday and being like, ‘Gosh darn it, I’m going to pull a miracle out.’”
As Lyles and Christian Coleman, two of the most decorated American sprinters of the past decade, watched the scoreboard to see whether they had qualified for worlds, an unexpected name popped up in first place that did not belong to either: Cravont Charleston.
Charleston ran 9.95 to beat Coleman (9.96) and Lyles. Charleston’s most prestigious victory before Friday, he said, had been at Mt. San Antonio College in Walnut.
Yet his training, under longtime professionals Allen Johnson, Torri Edwards-Johnson and Terrence Trammell, had given him confidence he could make the team. When they spoke after his title there was “relief,” Charleston said.
“Finally,” Johnson said to Charleston. “Now you’re coming into your own.”
The question of who is America’s fastest man is technically still up for debate, as Fred Kerley, last year’s world champion at 100 meters, is not running the 100 this week because he has a bye into August’s world meet.