After cruising to a first-place finish in the semifinals of the women’s 100-meter dash at the World Athletics Championships on Sunday, a race in which she emphatically wiped her brow before crossing the finish line, Sha’Carri Richardson was asked by a reporter what expectations she had for herself as the world anticipated her return to competitive track and field. The U.S. sprinter, staring ahead stone-faced rather than facing the reporter, briefly paused as she considered the question. But only for a moment, before launching into one of those monologues that are part getting this off my chest, part you have no idea what you’re about to see next. I’m not worried about the world anymore,” Richardson said Sunday in Budapest, Hungary. “I’ve seen the world be my friend. I’ve seen the world turn on me. At the end of the day, I’ve always been with me. God has always been with me. So being on this scale now, it’s my time. It’s always been my time, but now it’s my time to actually do it for myself, and the people that felt like me, and the people that look like me, and the people that know their truth about themselves as well. I represent those people.”During one month in the summer of 2021, Richardson went from relative obscurity to so famous that the rapper Drake would eventually drop her name in song to a level of notoriety seen only from heels in pro wrestling. But after her stunning first-place finish in the finals of the 100-meter race at the world championships on Monday, Richardson has started a new chapter of her nascent career, one that is perhaps less colorful than the woman we met two years ago, but just as authentic as ever. And while Richardson’s first international win can finally put behind her the chapter in her life that caused her so much joy and pain, that chapter explains the journey this Technicolor, thundering sprinter has taken to being a favorite at next summer’s Paris Games.
Richardson was already brash, eccentric, colorful, confident, charismatic, and the consummate showwoman. So of course she was prone to saying things such as “I am that girl” or tweeting, “My presence in this track game making history happen, no need for a thank you.” But Richardson understood that all of the talking served a purpose.
“The attention comes with the big personality, and I have no problem with it,” Richardson told the New York Times in early 2021. “It makes me work so I don’t end up looking crazy.”She got into back-and-forths with nameless Twitter accounts. She beefed with the female Jamaican sprinters. She somehow started a beef with Olympic champion Allyson Felix, the closest we have to a darling in American track and field. While later watching the Tokyo Games from home in the U.S., Richardson tweeted “missing me yet?” after Team USA was temporarily disqualified in the mixed relay
