Venue confusion leads to Fraser-Pryce’s withdrawal from 100m sprint, Julien Alfred wins
Three-time Olympic gold medallist Shelly-Ann Fraser-Pryce was a shock withdrawal from the 100m in an event that was eventually won by St Lucia’s Julien Alfred.
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Three-time Olympic gold medallist Shelly-Ann Fraser-Pryce withdrew from the 100m semi-finals after being denied entry to the warm-up track.
In a move which has outraged fans, Fraser-Pryce was nowhere to be seen for the second semi-final where she was due to race against American Sha’Carri Richardson.
A video circulating on social media showed Fraser-Pryce and Richardson waiting outside a gate to enter the facility at Stade de France but security officials denied them entry.
Both athletes reportedly arrived at the venue in private vehicles rather than the team shuttle and were told they would have to get another way into the venue.
Fraser-Pryce can be seen arguing that she had entered through the gate a day earlier for the 100m heats and hadn’t been informed of the rule change.
“She said they changed the rule yesterday. How can you change the rule and then not say? So, they’re asking all the athletes who, for whatever reason, don’t stay in the village, they can’t come through the gate?” Fraser-Pryce said.
Shelly-Ann Fraser-Pryce 🇯🇲 voicing out over a change of rules between yesterday & today.
— Track & Field Gazette (@TrackGazette) August 3, 2024
She is supposedly not being allowed into the warmup area.#Paris2024  pic.twitter.com/auANpTeuda
“We came through this gate yesterday and went through security and were okay. The man said we have to go all the way up where everybody else is entering to come back down here. That’s crazy.It’s understood the Jamaican legend then decided not to compete because the incident meant she didn’t get the required warm-up to be ready for the semi-final.
Richardson did show up and finished second to Julien Alfred which qualified her for the final.
Fraser-Pryce, 37, who won the 2008 and 2012 100m titles, had already announced she would be retiring after the Paris Olympics.
As for the race itself St Lucia star Julien Alfred has been crowned the new Olympic 100 metre champion under rainy skies at Stade de France.
Alfred (10.72s) raced down the straight in a national record as she beat home two Americans - Sha’Carri Richardson (10.87) and Melissa Jefferson (10.92).
Australia’s lone remaining hope Bree Masters was run out in the semi-finals after finishing seventh in her race. Alfred won the start and held off a late finishing Richardson, relegating the American superstar to the silver medal.
Alfred revealed afterwards she’d channelled Usain Bolt in the lead-up to the biggest race of her life.
“Usain Bolt won so many medals,” she said. “I went back this morning and watched his races. I’m not going to lie, it was all Usain Bolt’s races this morning.”
She said being the Olympic champion “had a good ring to it.”
“Right now I’m thinking of God, my Dad, who didn’t get to see me. He passed away in 2013. Dad, this is for you. I miss you. I did it for him, I did it for my coach and God.”
SHA’CARRI SCRIPT GETS LOST ALONG THE WAY
BY SCOTT GULLAN
THERE are so many fairytale stories at the Olympic Games, so many wonderful tales with happy endings which is why Sha’Carri Richardson was at the top of that list for Paris.
The women’s 100m final was all about the American in the weeks, days and hours leading up to the race but somewhere along the line the script got lost and a 23-year-old from the small Caribbean island of Saint Lucia ran away with it.
Julien Alfred is the Olympic champion because while the spotlight hovered all around her - we’ll get to the Jamaican debacle shortly - she did what was required, ran fast when it mattered.
She beat Richardson in the semi-final and then backed it up two hours later to win the gold medal in a national record 10.72sec. The form students always had her as the biggest threat to the Sha’Carri fairytale.
The American superstar didn’t shirk the issue, she leaves her first Olympic Games with a silver medal (10.87sec). Her teammate Melissa Jefferson (10.92sec) claimed bronze.
Alfred cut her teeth in the NCAA college system before winning a silver medal at the 2022 Commonwealth Games in Birmingham.
She put her markers for Paris down early in the year by winning the world 60m indoor title. She then ran a Saint Lucia national record 10.78sec early in June before easily winning the Monaco Diamond League in 10.85sec last month.
There was an uneasy sense about the Richardson fairytale after the semi-final where she had a poor start and was never able to really close on Alfred.
It was then revealed the reigning 100m world champion had been involved in a blow-up at the warm-up track where she had been denied entry along with Jamaican legend Shelly-Ann Fraser-Pryce.
While she showed up for the semi-final, Fraser-Pryce didn’t with her DNS sending shockwaves through Stade de France. While all this was going on Alfred quietly went about her business, winning the semi-final in 10.84sec and looking good.
Then to add more drama just minutes before the final, the heavens opened. Rain swept down on the purple track which had many thinking, what’s next?
A boilover was what happened and when the dust settles the Richardson camp will know they blew what can only be described as a golden opportunity.
Jamaica had owned the event, winning the past four editions, yet they started dropping like flies in the lead-up to Paris.
Defending champion Elaine Thompson-Herah pulled out a couple of months ago because of an achilles injury which passed the baton to Shericka Jackson, the world championships silver medallist from 12 months earlier.
But she didn’t want it, deciding when she got to Paris to dump the 100m and focus on her more preferred event, the 200m.
That left Fraser-Pryce at the age of 37 to be the one to ruin the Richardson party. Then she didn’t turn up either.
For 12 months all the discussion about the women’s 100m has centred around the Sha’Carri Richardson redemption journey .
When Richardson won the 2021 US trials she became an instant star. Bold, brash, stylish; she was a promoter’s dream and exactly what America needed.
A week later she gone, banned from the Tokyo Olympics after testing positive for THC, the active ingredient in marjuana, which is on the World Anti-Doping Agency’s banned list.
Richardson’s excuse was she ingested the pot to cope with learning her biological mother had died.
The spotlight quickly moves on athletics, those who are absent are soon forgotten and in Tokyo Thompson-Herah went berserk, creating history by defending her 100m (in record time) and 200m Olympic titles.
It was then Sha’Carri who?
In 2022 she ran last in her return race and then failed to make it out of the first round of the US championships.
After a year of soul searching where she developed “a better understanding of myself” Richardson returned and won the US trials before winning back her legion of fans with a devastating performance at the world championships in Budapest.
The happy Sha’Carri was back and the world was ready to embrace again when she won the 100m title from the outside lane in a championships record of 10.65sec.
It was pure box-office and set up the Paris Olympic redemption story perfectly.
But unfortunately this one didn’t have a happy ending.
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