Sha’Carri Richardson is not here. Day in, day out, the 24-year-old sprinter makes her way to central Florida’s posh Montverde Academy and joins her training mates on the school’s manicured track. Practice runs 10 a.m. to 2 p.m., coach Dennis Mitchell explains, rain or shine. The rest of the runners are present and accounted for this morning, limbering up under a sky of gathering clouds. But Richardson is stuck at the dentist—an emergency entailing novocaine, painkillers, the works. “We’ll see if she shows,” Mitchell says with a shrug. We’ll see? For most people, dental torture is a great excuse to skip a workout. Fire up Netflix, crack open a pint of ice cream. But then, most people aren’t Olympic-caliber athletes. Most people aren’t tipped for gold at this summer’s Paris Games. Most people aren’t Sha’Carri Richardson, the fastest woman in the world.
And lo and behold, two hours later, there she is. Shiny gold talons flashing as she laces up her sneakers and sets off on a swift warm-up jog. Track practice, I realize, observing from the bleachers, has something of the atmosphere of a movie set—lots of milling around, gossiping, finding ways to stay lively as you await your turn to perform. “Set ’em up!” Mitchell calls out, and four or five runners take their spots on the blocks to run, and rerun, the same 100, 200, 400 meters. When Richardson arrives, it’s a bit like a movie star showing up for her scene. Not diva-like in any way, just there to do the work. And by dint of her presence, raising everyone’s game. “Set ’em up!” calls Mitchell, and this time it’s Richardson taking launch, a five-foot-one pocket rocket crossing the 100-meter finish line in the interval of a single wide-eyed blink. Ambling back toward the starting line, she presses a hand to her swollen cheek, the briefest acknowledgment that, as is her habit, Sha’Carri Richardson is running through the pain.
“You keep showing up,” Richardson tells me later. “No matter what. Most people, they only think of track every four years. The Olympics, that’s all there is—those few seconds on TV. But for me, track is my life on a day-to-day basis. Everything I do—what I eat, what I drink, if I stay up too late—it’s all reflected on the track. Every choice. That’s what the world doesn’t see.”
Richardson talks about as fast as she runs. At first approach, she’s guarded, sizing you up with a hooded gaze. Then the “bubbly” Sha’Carri emerges—her description of herself—and the words start tumbling out, gaining momentum as she broaches areas of enthusiasm. Running, of course. Her signature long fingernails. Beyoncé. “Do I like Beyoncé? Of course I like Beyoncé. And Cowboy Carter, I mean, I went to Carter High School, in Dallas, we were the Carter Cowboys, so it’s full circle, Beyoncé, she’s a Texas girl like me….” When Richardson rhapsodizes about her family, she goes a mile a minute, as if that’s how she expresses love—through speed.
The flip side to these hurtling words is silence: There are things Richardson just won’t talk about. Her personal life is off-limits. So, too, the story of how she came to be raised by her grandmother Betty Harp, the woman Richardson refers to as “Big Momma,” and whom she credits with “making me the person I am.” Nor will she be drawn on the scandal that engulfed her three years ago, when, as a gold-medal favorite for the COVID-delayed Tokyo Olympics, she was suspended from the USA Track and Field team after testing positive for THC, the intoxicant in marijuana, and denied her chance to compete. Richardson explained at the time that she used the drug to cope with “emotional panic” after finding out from a reporter about her biological mother’s recent death. Brutal. Richardson also said she took responsibility for her actions and that she wasn’t looking for sympathy. What she wanted was to handle a private matter privately.
Instead, Sha’Carri Richardson became, for a few days in 2021, the internet’s punching bag. Tweets flew back and forth—some compassionate, many downright cruel. Meanwhile, the real Sha’Carri slipped away to nurse her wounds.
These days, her sole comment on the matter is an oblique one—a mantra Richardson has been repeating for the past year: “I’m not back, I’m better.” This she proved true at the track-and-field world championships in Budapest last August, blazing to a record 10.65-second first-place finish.
“I don’t just mean I’m a better runner,” Richardson tells me when I ask about her credo. “It’s beyond that. I’m better at being Sha’Carri. I’m better at being myself.”
Richardson remembers the moment she realized she was fast. As a kid, she was semi-hypnotized by a framed set of medals on her grandmother’s wall—prizes won by her aunt Shay Richardson when she was the family track star. Seeking to emulate her, young Sha’Carri challenged her aunt to races up the street in the South Dallas neighborhood where they lived. “We’d go from the bottom of the hill to Big Momma’s car,” Richardson explains. “And she didn’t slow down, she didn’t let me win. And I think it was in fifth grade, the day I touched the car first. And that’s when I knew.”
“People would say—that little girl, she’s running so fast?” recalls Lauren Cross, the girls track coach at Carter High School, who began working with Richardson when she was 14 and who was by her side as she left older, taller girls in the dust, blazing past Texas state records. “To be that good, that young, you realize as a coach that you’re dealing with someone exceptional,” says Cross, adding that part of what set Richardson apart was her self-discipline. “A lot of times you have kids who have the speed, but not the drive to do the work it takes to be great. Sha’Carri was totally determined. She had passion, she had brains, she was the whole package.”
By the time Richardson graduated high school in 2018, she was the number-one-ranked female sprint recruit in the United States. Her first year at Louisiana State, she broke the 100-meter collegiate record, clocking a 10.75 finish that made her, at the time, one of the 10 fastest women in history. With nothing left to prove in the NCAA, she turned pro, signing with Nike and commencing her training under Mitchell, who describes Richardson as a “once-in-a-generation talent.”
“Running that fast, it’s not natural—not for anyone,” says Mitchell. “You have to teach your body to push that hard, and to make all the little adjustments that shave off a half-second here, a half-second there. One aspect of Sha’Carri’s talent is that when you tell her, do this, she understands how to apply the change. She’s very in tune with her body.”
Observing track practice in Florida, I see what Mitchell means. To a casual viewer watching 100-meter sprints on TV, the whole race goes by in a burst. But there’s a detailed choreography. The push off the blocks, head down, barreling forward; a straightening-up a few paces in, steps short and fast; the lengthening stride in the last dash to the finish line. With each call of “set ’em up!” Mitchell is helping his runners refine this form. Over and over, day after day, “set ’em up, set ’em up.” Then, of course, there’s the weight training, the push-ups and crunches at practice’s end, the visits to the physical therapist and the masseuse. Not to mention, careful calibration of rest and nutrition and attitude. Track, as Richardson says, is a “24/7 lifestyle.” Constant behind-the-scenes effort for a few seconds of hoped-for glory.
“Every time you step on the track, it’s a validation of the time you’ve put in, the sacrifices you make on the daily,” Richardson notes. “When I get on the blocks, it’s about getting the job done. I know there’s joy at the other end, at the finish line. But I also know I’ve got to earn that happiness.”
Track is one great joy of Richardson’s life. The other is her family. The hardest thing about her current training regimen, she tells me, is that it leaves her precious little opportunity to head back to Texas and spend time with the people who shore her up. Especially now, with the klieg lights of global attention turned toward her again in the lead-up to Paris, Richardson seems to yearn for the shelter of Big Momma’s house. “We try not to go out in public when she’s here,” Harp says. “If Sha’Carri’s home, that’s private time. Nobody looking at her. Just playing card games, fooling around with her cousins. Just loving her to death.” And eating the food Richardson misses when she’s in Florida—Harp’s chicken and smothered potatoes, collard greens with fatback, Texas toast with homemade sausage and eggs.
But don’t get the wrong idea about Harp. As well as a purveyor of comfort food, she is—by her own account—the person who endowed Richardson with her extraordinary resilience and tenacity. “Sha’Carri’s tough; I made her tough,” says Harp matter-of-factly. “I’m a strong woman, I’ve overcome obstacles in my life. So I knew what I was talking about when, from time to time, things got hard and she’d want to quit—and I’d say, ‘Don’t start nothing and don’t finish it. You start, you finish,’ ” she emphasizes, enunciating each word. “Whatever happens, you keep going, you hear?”
Richardson readily agrees with Harp’s assessment of her influence. “Everything I am, it’s because of that strong, wise Black woman,” she says, referring to Big Momma. “Everything. I mean, I’ve been blessed, because I’ve had other people in my life who have helped me along. But the foundation, that’s her.”
Shay Richardson is another person Richardson credits with guiding her along a sometimes-arduous path; the contribution is reflected in the fact that Richardson calls her aunt “Mom.” Cross, her high school coach, has likewise been redubbed: Richardson refers to her as her “godmother” and has absorbed Cross into her extended family. Cross seems to have operated as the yin to Harp’s yang; as she notes, her encouragement of Richardson’s running career often took the form of telling her to ease up on herself. “Sha’Carri doesn’t need extra pressure,” Cross says. “She puts it on herself. So sometimes it’s been my job to say, ‘You know, one mistake doesn’t define you. It doesn’t determine the outcome.’ ”
That’s a lesson the “better” Sha’Carri seems to have taken to heart. When talk turns, inevitably, to the Paris Games, Richardson allows that, of course, she’s feeling some nerves. But then she quickly diverts to talking about all the races she has to run before Paris: The annual track-and-field season has just begun, and there is a slew of events between now—April—and the Games’ opening ceremony on the Seine in July. (Documentary cameras will be on hand for much of it; Richardson is one of the Olympic hopefuls in Netflix’s upcoming series Sprint.)
“It’s like chess,” explains Richardson, a fan of the game. “Every move you make is leading to checkmate. So the Olympics, okay, that’s checkmate, that’s the moment an athlete dreams about. But every race I have leading up to that matters too—that’s my opportunity to grow, so by the time I’m on the track in Paris, I know I’ve done my trial and error.” A race is won a step at a time, in other words—and the road to Paris is run one race at a time. The way she dissolves the pressure to deliver a gold-medal performance at the Games is by keeping herself fixed in the present, she tells me. “Because if all I’m doing is looking ahead, then I can’t be where I need to be. Which is here, now.”
And Richardson is letting herself enjoy the now, in all its variety. Sometimes enjoyment takes mellow form, a night in binge-watching Scandal. (“I know, I know—I’m late to that party.”) Sometimes the fun is in brainstorming with her trusted beauty team on hair and nail concepts for her meets—a way of making racing a creative endeavor, as well as an athletic one. And occasionally, there’s the all-out exuberance of days like her Vogue shoot, an experience especially treasured, Richardson says, because she got to share it with her family. “Looking over and seeing the smiles on their faces, knowing we’re creating a memory together…that’s validation for me,” she says. It’s through the eyes of her adored younger cousins that she takes the measure of her own success. “Like, they can see, okay, we come from a certain place, but applying yourself, believing in yourself, staying grounded in yourself, it will take you so far.”
There have been other such moments of validation recently—notably, this past November, when the track at the John Kincaide Stadium in Dallas was named after Richardson, thanks to an initiative spearheaded by Cross. In a video Richardson posted to her YouTube channel, you see her getting ready for the dedication, effervescent as a shook-up can of soda as she gets her makeup done and cackling with laughter at the delightful absurdity that the track where she ran as a youth is now “hers.” “It’s got my name on it!” Then there are tears, as Richardson greets family members at the stadium, and then there is the polished public personality, Sha’Carri the Great, stepping up to the dais in a fitted neon suit and telling the packed crowd, “I’m always going to put my best foot forward.” A woman in full. Nobody’s punching bag.
At one point during my day at the track in Florida, I ask Coach Mitchell what he wants in Richardson’s head when she takes the blocks in Paris. Every runner is different, he replies; with Sha’Carri “it’s business.” Go out there, get the job done. Later, when I ask Richardson what’s actually in her head when she’s posed on the blocks, waiting for the starter pistol to fire, she uses the same language: Get the job done. Then she pauses—an atypical intermission in her breakneck talk—and when she resumes speaking, it’s to tell me what, precisely, “getting the job done” means. It’s about winning, yes, but it’s also about honoring that little girl running up the hill to Big Momma’s car.
“Every time I step onto the track, I think of all those moments when I was younger—all those feelings are still with me, I’m just that little girl grown up,” Richardson explains. “It’s almost like a flashback journey, everything that brought me to that point. All the grind, all the sacrifice. And there’s a feeling of, this moment is special because all of that, the good, the bad, it’s brought me here. And I’m exactly where I’m supposed to be.”
In this story: hair, Key Rentz; makeup, Sally Branka.
