Sprinters catch up with Flo-Jo’s hallowed 100, 200 world records that have stood since 1988

For generations of girls’s 100-meter sprinters, 10.49 seconds is the world record they have been chasing since 1988.

For Al Joyner, it is time he sees all over the place he looks. Like in the future when he was considering auctioning off a pair of his late wife Florence Griffith Joyner’s spikes and happened to glance on the clock.

It read 10:49.

“I think in moments like this she asks, ‘Hello, how are you?’ I’m still here,” Joyner said in a telephone interview with the Associated Press.

The aura and records of Griffith Joyner hang over the track to this present day. Known for her long and colourful nails, striking outfits and funky nickname “Flo-Jo”, in 1988 she experienced a magical run that once more entered the record books. During the Olympic Games within the USA, she set a results of 100, 10.49, and on her technique to the gold medal on the Olympic Games in Seoul, she exceeded 200, 21.34.

It seemed as if the records would never be broken. However, Flo-Jo’s performance appears to be close by on the Paris Olympics this summer. A gaggle of sprinters jump out of the blocks, not seeing an intimidating time, but fairly a record that must be broken.

“I mean (a few) years ago I would have said, ‘No, it’ll never happen,'” American Gabby Thomas said last season’s record 200. “With technology and the way our competitors operate? Absolutely. … Maybe I’m crazy enough to believe this could happen in the next few years.”

Jamaican sprinter Shericka Jackson nearly broke Flo-Jo’s 200-meter mark on the world championships in Budapest, Hungary last summer, posting a time of 21.41 seconds, the second-fastest time ever.

Joyner’s take? Go get it. Because he would love to see it.

“I remember Florence being asked if anyone had broken her records and how she would feel,” said Joyner, whose wife died in her sleep in 1998 on the age of 38 after an epileptic seizure. “She said she can be sad but pleased because records are supposed to be broken. But it could be like losing your best friend.

Of the ten fastest times within the 200, five were set by Jackson, two by Thomas and one by Elaine Thompson-Herah of Jamaica, and the remaining two were by Griffith Joyner.

At the championships, Jackson wrote her race number twice before the competition – at 9:40 p.m. (she almost predicted her time) and one other one that she didn’t reveal.

Of course, it would have had something to do with Griffith Joyner’s days.

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“When I crossed the finish line and saw the time, I believed, ‘I’m close. I’m close,” Jackson said after the race.

In the 100m, Thompson-Herah – a two-time defending Olympic champion in each sprints – was just shy of Flo-Jo’s mark in 2021 with a time of 10.54 seconds, the just one to interrupt 10.50 seconds – or lower – apart from Griffith Joyner. That is, in winds considered legal (2.0 meters per second or less).

Thompson-Herah looked like she could break the record in Paris, but her health could also be an element. She gave the impression to be injured on the finish line of Sunday’s USATF New York Grand Prix.

The 37-year-old Jamaican Shelly-Ann Fraser-Pryce can be on the decline, whose best end in her profession is 10.60 seconds. Another one that could lower the bar is American Sha’Carri Richardson, the present 100-meter world champion with a larger-than-life personality who could develop into the world’s next big sprint star. Richardson ran 10.57 seconds in the course of the competition on April 8, 2023, however the wind exceeded the legal limit. Her best allowable time within the wind competition at August’s world championships was 10.65, beating Jackson and Fraser-Pryce.

“I see a new generation of Flo-Jos,” said Joyner, the 1984 Olympic triple jump champion. “The legacy she left behind, which she didn’t even know she was leaving, is that her dreams became the dreams of many, many ladies. …Because she all the time hoped they’d take greater steps, because she never wanted them to be like her. She wanted them to be higher than her.

Griffith Joyner’s record of 100 points was set on a windy day in Indianapolis, but officials ruled it as legal wind. She overtook Evelyn Ashford, who achieved a results of 10.76 in 1984.

Since then, few have come near touching the Flo-Jo mark. For comparison, since 1988 the lads’s record has been lowered a dozen times to its current level – 9.58 by Usain Bolt in 2009.

“One of Florence’s most famous slogans was to believe in the impossible,” Joyner said. “You set your own standard, and when you set it and exceed it, that’s when records are broken and amazing things happen.”

In those days, there was the specter of doping (Griffith Joyner passed every drug test). The only individual women’s running records that have been within the books longer are the 400 meters (Marita Koch of the GDR, 1985) and the 800 meters (Jarmila Kratochvilova of Czechoslovakia, 1983).

Joyner saw Flo-Jo as a sprinter who never limited her performance.

Today he sees sprinters who don’t need to set limits.

“It’s not, ‘Oh, this is such a scary record,’” Joyner said. “These records will be broken. I do not know when. But they will be broken.”