Saint Lucia's Alfred says Olympic gold shows talent counts, not your passport / Photo: Anne-Christine POUJOULAT - AFP
Saint Lucia's Alfred says Olympic gold shows talent counts, not your passport
Saint Lucia's Julien Alfred is bidding to add world 100 metres gold in Tokyo to her Olympic title and says her triumph last year shows no matter how small a nation you come from there is no need "to feel inferior".
The 24-year-old displayed no fear at the Paris Games, despite only having turned professional in 2023 after a stunning US college career, as she convincingly beat reigning world champion Sha'Carri Richardson.
On Saturday at the world championships Alfred begins her campaign to become the first woman to hold both the Olympic and world 100m crowns simultaneously since Jamaican legend Shelly-Ann Fraser-Pryce won in Moscow in 2013 to add to her 2012 victory at the London Olympics.
It was the second time Fraser-Pryce, who retires after these championships, had done the double, having won Olympic gold in Beijing in 2008 and the world title in Berlin a year later.
For Alfred such feats lie in the future -- the first goal for Saint Lucia's sprint queen is to rubberstamp her championship credentials in Tokyo.
"Being from a tiny island of 258 square miles with about 180,000 people it shows no matter where you are from you can compete on the biggest stage," she told World Athletics.
"You do not need to feel inferior or small to others round you, no matter where they are from."
Fortunately for fast-starting Alfred, who warmed up for the championships with a timely victory in the Diamond League finals in Zurich last month, she did not suffer after winning the Olympic title as she had done after landing the 60m world indoor crown earlier in 2024.
"What's funny about winning the 60m title is one would think it would give me a boost but it actually made me go into depression," she said.
"Winning St Lucia's first global medal made me realise when I went back home how many people were supporting me and rooting for me.
"It scared me as I felt I had to go back on the world stage and repay them and I was suffocating myself with lots of pressure, so I went into a really dark place at the time."
- 'Swell-headed' -
The self-deprecatory champion -- "in Budapest in the 2023 world championships I was unsure of myself and very shy, I still am" she said with a laugh -- may find it easier to absorb success now, but she is conscious of what that Olympic gold means.
"Being Olympic champion it is a heavy weight for the one who wears the Olympic crown. You feel it," she said.
Alfred, though, had shown throughout her life that she has the strength to chase away the mental demons.
The death of her father, Julian Hamilton, when she was just 12 had a profound effect, to such an extent that two years later she chose to leave Saint Lucia to attend school in Jamaica, the birthplace of legends such as her idol Usain Bolt and triple Olympic sprint gold medallist Shelly-Ann Fraser-Pryce.
"I did have tough times when I was 14," Alfred said last year.
"I got an opportunity to go to Jamaica. So I think getting the opportunity to go to a place where Usain Bolt is was ideal and I decided I wanted to be there and my mum gave me the opportunity to go.
"She didn't say no. She just said to me if you want to go then, OK."
Understandably tearful after her historic victory in the Olympic final, she dedicated it to her late father.
"Dad, who believed that I could do it," she said. "He passed away in 2013, and now he couldn't get to see me on the biggest stage of my career. But he'll always be so boastful of his daughter being an Olympian."
If her rivals in Tokyo think that Olympic gold sated her appetite, then they better think again.
"I don't want to get swell-headed and think that I've made it because there's more that I want to achieve in life," she told Olympics.com.
M.Stevenson--EWJ
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