Sha’Carri Richardson dazzles as US women’s 4×100 relay anchor, but Gabby Thomas set the table: ‘She completes the equation’
PARIS — Sha’Carri Richardson took the baton from Gabby Thomas and blew down the final straightaway of the women’s 4×100-meter relay at Stade de France Friday night, picking off three sprinters one by one. So confident she was about to win her first Olympic gold medal, Richardson had time to turn her head and look at her final victim, Great Britain’s Daryll Neita, just a few meters before crossing the finish line.
It was a stunning anchor leg from Richardson, whose 10.09-second split was exactly what the US team needed after she and Thomas shared a clumsy handoff that dropped them from first place — thanks to Twanisha Terry’s blistering 9.98-second split on the second leg — to fourth then back to the front. Melissa Jefferson ran the first leg in 11.46 seconds and Thomas was clocked at 10.25 on the third. It was the kind of finish the men’s 4×100 team did not have Friday, when a botched first handoff disqualified them from the race.
All of which made it one more reminder of just how difficult it is to turn a solo sport like track into a team event in a relay. For the women to blaze to victory the way they did, with three regular training partners (Richardson, Jefferson and Terry) joined by Thomas, leaves us with two important new truths:
Richardson finally has her first gold medal, erasing not only the disappointment of being disqualified from the US team for Tokyo Games three years ago for a positive marijuana test but also besting the silver she took in the 100-meter race here last Saturday.
And Gabby Thomas has her second gold. With a possible third to come.
So here’s another new truth: As these Olympics enter their final days and the page turns toward Los Angeles in 2028, the look back at Paris will be remembered as the full and final introduction of Northampton’s own hometown star Thomas to the rest of the sporting world. Her medals (gold in the 200-meter dash, gold in the 4×100 relay and a possible third to come in Saturday’s 4×400) and her mettle (five-time-and-counting Olympic medalist, Harvard graduate in neurobiology, University of Texas Masters degree in public health) push her to the front of a sport whose quadrennial moment in the Olympic spotlight deserves to shine more brightly in the intervening years.
Thomas, 27, is their ready-to-made star.
“She’s the type of female that should be in front of the track world. She’s the type of female that everybody should look up to and want to be like,” said teammate McKenzie Long, the 24-year-old who finished seventh in the 200. Long’s first Olympics didn’t end with a medal, but it did end with a mentor.
“In the finals, she was telling me to just be myself and give it all I had. She was really empowering me. I really love [the gold medal] for her. She deserves it. Just her poise — she’s very much an empowerment woman you can just tell by how she carries herself.
“She reminds me of me, but an older version. I got closer to her this go round than I did at trials and that was really awesome. I felt like she was carrying me under her wing.”
Thomas did her part by holding onto that baton Friday, setting up Richardson for the electric final leg despite the hiccup on the exchange.
“Things aren’t going to go 100 percent every single time,” Thomas said. “It was raining really hard when we were doing that and we’re just moving really fast and trying to get a stick around. We have trust and we’ve done this before. You don’t panic when it’s your job.”
And you don’t panic when you have Richardson.
“Obviously passing the baton to Sha’Carri is a very special and unique thing,” Thomas said. “She is so fast and you know she turns her hands as soon as she gets her hands on the baton. I felt very proud and I was grateful. I was grateful to be here with these ladies, hand it off to Sha’Carri, and we got the gold.”
High up in the stands, Martha McCullagh sat watching Thomas, her former student and track star on the team she coached at the Williston Northampton School. McCullagh was a bit farther away than the ringside seat she had Thursday night when Thomas won the 200, where she was able to lean over the front-row wall and hug the gold medalist. But it didn’t matter. As she said to her husband before the race, “We’re going to see Gabby win another gold medal!”
And so they did. McCullagh recalled details of the admission Thomas made Thursday, how it was her mom that pushed her to run track, a sport she would not have chosen herself despite her god-given afterburners.
“When she was in the seventh grade she wanted to go out for softball, and this was before I was working with her, she wanted to go for softball because some of her friends were playing and thought it looked like fun and her mom, who is great, said ‘No, you’re fast,’” McCullagh said.
“She did and she had fun with it. One of our philosophies at Williston is that we want to maintain the joy of competing. That’s not to say we weren’t thrilled when she won 12 New England championships, and set the record a number of times, that can also be joyful.”
That perspective has become part of Thomas’ foundation. As she stood on the medal stand, after the national anthem ended and Richardson wiped away tears, Thomas gathered her arm around her teammate. Then as photographers clamored, she pulled the US foursome together to make room on the top step for the silver medalists from Great Britain and bronze medalists from Germany.
“The third leg is a crucial leg,” Terry said. “She is someone that comes in and fits the equation. She completes the equation. She definitely fits the pieces that are here.”