“Every time you step on the track, it’s a validation of the time you’ve put in, the sacrifices you make on the daily,” Richardson notes. “When I get on the blocks, it’s about getting the job done. I know there’s joy at the other end, at the finish line. But I also know I’ve got to earn that happiness.”
GROUP EFFORT
Richardson, center, with, clockwise from far left, her sister, Tahjna Calhoun, her cousins Calvin Harp and Natalie Byers, her aunt Brenda Davis, and her cousins Aniyah Davis, Kyle Harp, and Bella Harp.
Track is one great joy of Richardson’s life. The other is her family. The hardest thing about her current training regimen, she tells me, is that it leaves her precious little opportunity to head back to Texas and spend time with the people who shore her up. Especially now, with the klieg lights of global attention turned toward her again in the lead-up to Paris, Richardson seems to yearn for the shelter of Big Momma’s house. “We try not to go out in public when she’s here,” Harp says. “If Sha’Carri’s home, that’s private time. Nobody looking at her. Just playing card games, fooling around with her cousins. Just loving her to death.” And eating the food Richardson misses when she’s in Florida—Harp’s chicken and smothered potatoes, collard greens with fatback, Texas toast with homemade sausage and eggs.
But don’t get the wrong idea about Harp. As well as a purveyor of comfort food, she is—by her own account—the person who endowed Richardson with her extraordinary resilience and tenacity. “Sha’Carri’s tough; I made her tough,” says Harp matter-of-factly. “I’m a strong woman, I’ve overcome obstacles in my life. So I knew what I was talking about when, from time to time, things got hard and she’d want to quit—and I’d say, ‘Don’t start nothing and don’t finish it. You start, you finish,’ ” she emphasizes, enunciating each word. “Whatever happens, you keep going, you hear?”
Richardson readily agrees with Harp’s assessment of her influence. “Everything I am, it’s because of that strong, wise Black woman,” she says, referring to Big Momma. “Everything. I mean, I’ve been blessed, because I’ve had other people in my life who have helped me along. But the foundation, that’s her.”
Shay Richardson is another person Richardson credits with guiding her along a sometimes-arduous path; the contribution is reflected in the fact that Richardson calls her aunt “Mom.” Cross, her high school coach, has likewise been redubbed: Richardson refers to her as her “godmother” and has absorbed Cross into her extended family. Cross seems to have operated as the yin to Harp’s yang; as she notes, her encouragement of Richardson’s running career often took the form of telling her to ease up on herself. “Sha’Carri doesn’t need extra pressure,” Cross says. “She puts it on herself. So sometimes it’s been my job to say, ‘You know, one mistake doesn’t define you. It doesn’t determine the outcome.’ ”
That’s a lesson the “better” Sha’Carri seems to have taken to heart. When talk turns, inevitably, to the Paris Games, Richardson allows that, of course, she’s feeling some nerves. But then she quickly diverts to talking about all the races she has to run before Paris: The annual track-and-field season has just begun, and there is a slew of events between now—April—and the Games’ opening ceremony on the Seine in July. (Documentary cameras will be on hand for much of it; Richardson is one of the Olympic hopefuls in Netflix’s upcoming series Sprint.)
“It’s like chess,” explains Richardson, a fan of the game. “Every move you make is leading to checkmate. So the Olympics, okay, that’s checkmate, that’s the moment an athlete dreams about. But every race I have leading up to that matters too—that’s my opportunity to grow, so by the time I’m on the track in Paris, I know I’ve done my trial and error.” A race is won a step at a time, in other words—and the road to Paris is run one race at a time. The way she dissolves the pressure to deliver a gold-medal performance at the Games is by keeping herself fixed in the present, she tells me. “Because if all I’m doing is looking ahead, then I can’t be where I need to be. Which is here, now.”