All eyes were on Sha’Carri Richardson as she attempted to end a long American wait for Olympic women’s 100m gold on Saturday — but it was Julien Alfred, from an island of 180,000 people, who stole the show.

The Saint Lucian sprinter delivered a brilliant performance to win the 100m final in a national record 10.72 seconds, beating world champion Richardson into silver and breaking Jamaica’s recent stranglehold over the event.

That it was Saint Lucia’s first Olympic medal only made the moment sweeter.
“I feel honoured just to be an ambassador for my country,” Alfred told reporters. “Not many people know about Saint Lucia. Sometimes I can be in an Uber and they ask me where I’m from... and they’ll be like ‘Where’s Saint Lucia?’”

There are David-and-Goliath stories to be found across any Olympics but perhaps few of the proportion of Saint Lucia versus the United States — or Jamaica.

Saint Lucia, an Eastern Caribbean island nation, had never previously had an athlete on the Olympic podium while Americans have won well over 300 titles in athletics alone, topping the all-time medal table by a massive margin.

Alfred, 23, got herself in the right mindset by watching videos of retired Jamaican great Usain Bolt on Saturday morning and by the evening had catapulted herself into her country’s own pantheon of greats.

Alfred’s victory completed a journey that included her father’s death in 2013 and a move to Jamaica as a teenager, alone. “He believed I could do it,” Alfred said, crying as she talked about her dad. “He couldn’t get to see me on the biggest stage of my career.”