Shelly-Ann Fraser-Pryce maintains she will retire from professional sprinting after the World Championships that start in two weeks. However, she will not be done racing.
Fraser-Pryce, who owns a record seven global 100m titles (2008 and 2012 Olympics, plus five World Championships), has been nearly as famous in recent years for dusting the field in the parents race at her son’s school in Jamaica.
“What amazes me is the fact that they actually think they stood a chance,” she said with a smile and a chuckle. “I don’t think they understand exactly who I am, because I’m taking no prisoners. I do not care if it’s for fun.”
Fraser-Pryce, 38, looks forward to next year’s parents race. Even in retirement, she will not let up.
“I would never do that,” she said, still laughing. “It’s not in my DNA to do it.”
That racing DNA is also why Fraser-Pryce, who said in 2023 that she planned to retire after the 2024 Paris Olympics, chose to come back for a farewell 2025 season.
Fraser-Pryce mentioned “unfinished business” both in an April Instagram post heralding her return and in more detailed comments Friday ahead of worlds in Tokyo.
At the 2024 Olympics, Fraser-Pryce advanced out of the first round in the 100m, then withdrew before the semifinals. At the time, she did not publicly announce why.
Eleven months later, it was addressed in a Marie Claire profile. It reported that Fraser-Pryce, who normally arrives at the track three hours before competing to warm up, lost an hour due to being denied access at one entry gate and waiting there at least 30 minutes to see if she’d be let in. The most decorated sprinter in history wasn’t and went to another entrance.
Once she got to warm-up, Fraser-Pryce felt her body “shutting down” due to leg muscle cramps in her final two reps on the track, Marie Claire reported.
Both in that article and again on Friday, Fraser-Pryce said she believed she had a panic attack.
“I felt like that moment was just taken from me,” she said Friday, reflecting on Paris. “Whether it’s the circumstances, things like that, I believe I didn’t get the opportunity to really just do what I know I could have done in that moment. And it was hurtful. It was the first time in my entire career that I’ve never been able to step to a line to compete. And if anyone knows me, it doesn’t matter what’s happening, I’m going to be at the line. And not being able to be at that line to compete was heartbreaking for me. It was something I had to deal with for a couple of months after Paris.”
Fraser-Pryce chose not to end her career on that note.
She realized that the 2025 World Championships are in the same country where she made her global championship debut at the 2007 Worlds in Osaka. She brought that up in an opening address Friday.
“It’s such a privilege to be able to do things on my own terms,” she said.
Fraser-Pryce grew up in the Waterhouse neighborhood of Kingston, sharing one bed with her mom and two brothers and running barefoot until a teacher bought her spikes in grade six.
(Fraser-Pryce conjured that upbringing in a June speech at an event honoring her career. “It is my mandate to make sure that every single student at the primary level in this country will never run barefoot at the National Stadium,” said the founder of the Pocket Rocket Foundation.)
Shelly-Ann Fraser-Pryce, a two-time Olympic 100m gold medalist, will retire after her 2025 season.
“I was just a teeny-tiny thing in this wide, wondrous world,” she wrote in “I am a Promise,” her 2020 autobiographical children’s book that Jamaican Prime Minister Andrew Holness read to students. “As tiny as I was, I was also very fast and I loved to run. So I ran to school. I ran to the shop. I ran like a rocket. I ran to be free. I ran everywhere because that was me.”
By 2007, Fraser-Pryce, then 20, was fifth at the Jamaican Championships to earn the last spot on the Osaka Worlds team. She traveled 8,000 miles to race once — in the preliminary heats of the 4x100m relay, ultimately earning a silver medal.
The next year, Fraser-Pryce broke 11 seconds for the first of 87 times in her career to finish runner-up at nationals, earning her first individual 100m start at a global championship at the Beijing Olympics.
She went into the Games tied for third in the world by best time that year.
“My goals were to make the final,” she said.
On Aug. 17, 2008, Fraser-Pryce (then Fraser, with braces) blasted out of the Bird’s Nest starting blocks and won by two tenths of a second — the second-largest margin in the last 60 years after Florence Griffith-Joyner in 1988. She was the youngest Olympic women’s 100m champion in 44 years.
From 2008 through 2022, Fraser-Pryce won seven of the 11 global 100m titles between the Olympics and worlds. In 2017, she watched the world championships on TV, then gave birth to son Zyon the day after the 100m final. She won the next world title two years later.
Fraser-Pryce felt she ‘could do anything’ in 2019
Shelly-Ann Fraser-Pryce reflects on the 2019 World Track and Field Championships, where she won the women’s 100m, and the significance of achieving that feat while being a mother over 30 at the time.
American Carmelita Jeter, whom Fraser-Pryce named when asked her top rival, described the 5-foot Jamaican as “quiet but fierce.”
“She would get on the line, and she would just be smiling and waving,” said Jeter, the 2012 Olympic silver medalist behind Fraser-Pryce. “And I used to always think to myself, OK, what’s she smiling about?”
In 2013, Fraser-Pryce succeeded Jeter as world champion. She then found Jeter after the final. She told the American that she couldn’t believe that Jeter could race having torn her quad that year.
“That was like the biggest respect, compliment that anybody could give me, because she could see my passion,” said Jeter, now the head coach at UNLV.
In retirement, Fraser-Pryce will miss the training more than the championship races.
“It’s such a great feeling when something goes wrong, and you’re not getting it right, but then that consistent and persistent drive that you have, you get it right the next time,” she said. “I think those lessons have been things that I’ve used not just in track, but in life. It teaches me that not because today is bad means that tomorrow is going to be bad. It can be good.”
Fraser-Pryce, seeded 10th in the projected 2025 World 100m field by best time this year, said that success for her in Tokyo is simply lining up to race: first round, semifinals, final — what she was denied in 2024.
“I’m really looking forward to just celebrating the story, the commitment and the joy that this sport has given me,” she said. “Anything else that happens after that, it’s definitely a brawta (or added bonus).”
Jamaican sprinter Shelly-Ann Fraser-Pryce, 36, is one of the fastest women in the world.
