Shadow

Within track, the sprints are the most unadulterated expression of human excellence.

They don’t need guile like the middle-distance races do; nor do they call for the fine balance between pace and endurance that the marathon exemplifies. The sprints are raw pace, unbridled power, and a visceral desire to hit the tape faster than the next person while holding nothing back over 10, 20 or 40 seconds. The starting gun sounds like a suggestion in the longer races, a signal in the middle distances, and a call to arms in the sprints.

But sprinting has long battled the most-dreaded D-word in sport: doping.

On the men’s side, Michael Johnson changed the paradigm in the 400m in the 1990s, dominating the field and obliterating the world record to lift the cloud over the previous decade, when dope allegations flew thick and fast. In the 100m and the 200m, Usain Bolt’s arrival in the Aughts pulverised the past in a manner that only the greatest athlete ever could have.

Meanwhile, women’s sprinting was unable to shake off the real and perceived injustices of history. The 100m and 200m world records have been held by the American Florence Griffith-Joyner since 1988, and the 400m record by the German Marita Koch since 1985. Neither athlete ever failed a dope test, but suspicions have lingered about the use of performance-enhancing drugs that were not detectable at the time. Their records, fair or foul, are marked by invisible asterisks that women’s athletics has desperately wanted to erase.

The only way to do that is to go faster. And the wait may soon be over.

BRAVE NEW WORLD

It was a windy February day in 2001. In Dunbar, population 600, a census town in Georgetown County, South Carolina, preachers Melvin Jefferson and Johanna Jefferson welcomed a sixth child into their family. They called her Melissa.

At just five weeks old, baby Melissa underwent surgery to pump out curdled formula from her stomach. When she was 17, she donated stem cells to her father, who was suffering from myelodysplastic syndrome, after the hospital waitlist did not throw up any suitable candidates for a transplant.

Eighteen months before Melissa Jefferson was born, in the summer of 1999, the borough of Dullen, population 7,600, in Middlesex County, New Jersey, was graced by the arrival of its newest resident. With less than a year to go for the 2000 Summer Olympics, former track stars Willie McLaughlin and Mary McLaughlin called their third daughter Sydney.

Sydney McLoughlin’s early troubles were more within than without. As a young athlete, she constantly sought validation, beating herself up any time she felt she hadn’t done well enough. Battling these demons, she turned to the Christian gospel and emerged track-ready again.

This September, over the course of a week at the World Athletics Championships in Tokyo, Melissa Jefferson-Wooden and Sydney McLaughlin-Lavrone, now 24 and 26 years old, their double-barrelled surnames underlining their marital statuses, were crowned the queens of modern sprinting.

Jefferson-Wooden is the first woman since the Jamaican Shelly-Ann Fraser-Pryce in 2013 to win the 100-200 sprint double at the Worlds. Her margins of victory in Tokyo were Bolt-like: 0.15 seconds in the 100m and 0.46 seconds in the 200m. Her timings were the fourth (100m) and eighth (200m) fastest ever recorded.

McLaughlin-Lavrone, the world’s pre-eminent 400m hurdler for the past five years — she has set or broken the world record six times since 2021 and won gold medals in both the Tokyo and Paris Olympics — inexplicably decided to switch to the 400-flat earlier this year. Her run at the Worlds was the second-fastest in history, within two-tenths of a second of the time set by Koch 40 years ago.

And so, through these two champions, born six seasons and 700 miles apart, the suspicious gap with the Dirty ’80s was narrowed at long last.

Though the Jamaican trio of Elaine Thomson-Herah, Shelly-Ann Fraser-Pryce and Shericka Jackson pushed closer and closer to the 100m and 200m marks over the past decade, and the Frenchwoman Marie Jose-Perec got within 0.65 seconds of the 400m record in the late 1990s, the final step has proved elusive.

It was fitting that Fraser-Pryce, now 38, finished sixth when Jefferson-Wooden won the 100m gold at the Worlds to complete the passing of the baton. In the 400m final, McLaughlin-Lavronne’s winning time of 47.78 was just 0.2 seconds faster than that of the Dominican Republic’s Mariliedy Paulino, who won silver but ran the third-fastest 400m ever.

The sign of a simultaneous revolution across the three sprints is here at last. At Tokyo 2025, Jefferson-Wooden and McLaughlin-Lavronne infused new life into women’s athletics. It feels, and not a moment too soon, like we’re closer than ever to finally moving on.

(The views expressed are personal)