RBS #84 Is this Sha’Carri Richardson’s time? After lost Olympic shot, the sprint star is back…

RBS #84
Is this Sha’Carri Richardson’s time? After lost Olympic shot, the sprint star is back…

Making up for lost time is a misnomer. Time can’t be recovered. It’s a scarcity, inherently unretrievable. So Sha’Carri Richardson can’t make up for the years of waiting and working towards her first Olympics. She can’t go back and undo the failed marijuana test that deprived her of an Olympic debut in 2021.

The only thing she can do now, as the Olympic trials kick off Friday at the University of Oregon, is prove time wasn’t lost at all. It was seized, converted into fuel.

Three years of waiting. Three years of stigmatization. Three years of delayed anointing. It’s now time for the 24-year-old Richardson to snatch the crown she seems destined to wear.

And perhaps because time has been lost, and conservative isn’t her style, Richardson declared for the 100- and the 200-meter at the trials.

Finishing top three in the 100-meter race at the Olympic trials will earn her a spot in Paris and put her on the biggest stage of her sport. If she does the same in the 200, she could attempt to become the first American woman since Florence Griffith-Joyner, aka Flo-Jo, to win the daunting sprint double. In 1988, Flo-Jo followed her 100-meter win by setting the world record in the 200 (21.34 seconds) which still holds today.

It might be optimal for Richardson to focus on the 100, considering the difficulty of Olympic gold in her best event. But as long as she’s waited for this moment, why not go for it? She’s already spent a while on the porch of the superstardom her ability long prophesied.

In June 2021 at the Olympic trials, delayed a year because of COVID-19, she ran the 100-meter dash in 10.86 seconds in the final. Surging from behind with a superstar’s finish, Richardson won by more than a tenth of a second. She’d realized her dreams of making the Olympics.

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