Jamaican sprinter Shelly-Ann Fraser-Pryce was the first 100m sprinter to win individual medals in four consecutive Olympic Games; Fraser-Pryce is the oldest woman to win the 100m world title after taking gold in Eugene in 2022 at the age of 35
Last Updated: 09/02/24 11:19am
Shelly-Ann Fraser-Pryce has revealed her plans to retire after the Olympics
Three-time Olympic champion sprinter Shelly-Ann Fraser-Pryce will retire after the 2024 Paris Olympics, saying she owes it to her family.
Fraser-Pryce was the first 100m sprinter to win individual medals in four consecutive Olympic Games. The Jamaican began her journey in Beijing 2008, which saw her become the first Caribbean woman to win gold in the women’s 100m.
She held on to her 100m title in London 2012, joining a select few to have done so. Despite battling a toe injury, she won bronze in 2016 Rio Olympics and a silver in relay.
After giving birth in 2017, she won another Olympic silver and a relay gold in Tokyo 2020.
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“My son needs me, my husband and I have been together since before I won in 2008. He has sacrificed for me,” 37-year-old Fraser-Pryce told Essence.com.
“We’re a partnership, a team, and it’s because of that support that I’m able to do the things that I have been doing for all these years,” she added. “I think I now owe it to them to do something else.”
Currently, she is focused on preparing for Paris, which takes place from July 26 to August 11 and something she views as an opportunity to push boundaries.
Shelly-Ann Fraser-Pryce will feature in the Paris Olympics this summer
It is about “showing people that you stop when you decide. I want to finish on my own terms,” she said.
In 2019, she became the oldest woman to claim the 100m World Championship title in Doha. She further solidified this achievement by winning the title again at the age of 35 in Eugene in 2022, 14 years after her initial Olympic gold triumph.
“It’s not enough that we step on a track and we win medals. You have to think about the next generation that’s coming after you, and give them the opportunity to also dream – and dream big,” Fraser-Pryce added.
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The terrifying moment when a door plug to a Boeing 737 Max 9 suddenly blew open while the jet was 16,000 feet in the air was a “mistake” that “can never happen again,” airline Chief Executive Dave Calhoun said during a company town hall.
Calhoun told employees Tuesday, “We are going to approach it with 100% transparency every step of the way” while “acknowledging our mistake.”
“This stuff matters,” he said. “Everything matters. Every detail matters.”
But nearly a week after the alarming incident, which reportedly ripped the shirt off a teenage boy and the headrests off some seats, it remains unclear what exactly the error was — and why a hole burst open in the side of Alaska Airlines Flight 1282 as it neared cruising altitude on its scheduled journey from Portland, Ore., to Southern California.
Meanwhile, the ripple effects of the midair ordeal continue to be felt. Alaska Airlines said Wednesday it would cancel all flights scheduled aboard 737 Max 9s until at least Saturday to allow time for inspections.
The decision is expected to affect 110 to 150 flights per day, according to the airline.
“We regret the significant disruption that has been caused for our guests by cancellations due to these aircraft being out of service,” the airline said in a statement. “We hope this action provides guests with a little more certainty, and we are working around the clock to re-accommodate impacted guests on other flights.”
Boeing released video of a brief portion of Calhoun’s comments to employees days after the Federal Aviation Administration grounded all 737 Max 9 jets and issued an emergency airworthiness directive calling for all Max 9s with mid-cabin door plugs to be inspected before returning to the air.
It’s unclear how long the planes will be out of use.
Calhoun on Tuesday complimented Alaska and other airlines, saying that although it was a difficult decision, grounding the planes “prevented, potentially, another accident or another moment.”
The National Transportation Safety Board, which is investigating the incident, said Tuesday that investigators were still trying to locate four missing bolts that were meant to keep the door plug on Flight 1282 from shifting up and blowing wide open mid-flight.
The door plug in question filled in an additional emergency exit that Alaska was not using in its modified layout of the 737 Max 9.
It’s unclear what role, if any, the bolts played in the incident. NTSB officials also said they were transporting the door plug to their laboratory in Washington, D.C., to determine whether the bolts were missing before the flight or if they were broken off because of the incident.
Earlier this week, Alaska and United airlines also reported they found loose bolts on some of their 737 Max 9 jets during inspections spurred by Friday’s flight, which was supposed to land in Ontario.
NTSB Chair Jennifer Homendyon Tuesday said the agency was aware of reports from other airlines about the bolts but was focused on trying to find out what happened specifically to Flight 1282.
“We need to, first and foremost, figure out what happened with this aircraft,” she said. “If we have a bigger systemwide or fleet issue, we will issue an urgent safety recommendation or push for change.”
Calhoun said Boeing was working with the NTSB in the investigation.
NTSB investigators had also been looking into a warning light on Flight 1282 that had illuminated three times in the last month, indicating a possible problem with pressurization.
Alaska Airlines had restricted the plane from flying transcontinental routes, according to the NTSB.
On Tuesday, however, Homendy said the system appeared to have been working as intended, and was not the cause of the expulsion of the door plug.
E-commerce and fintech company Bolt, which was at one time the subject of a federal probe, confirmed it laid off 29% of its staff, according to a company spokesperson.
In an emailed statement, the Bolt spokesperson said the one-click checkout company made the cuts to get Bolt to “an operating model optimized for sustainable growth and efficiency.”
“We made the difficult but important decision to reduce layers and roles across the company — setting ourselves up with the speed and agility required for the next phase of our business,” according to the statement.
This latest round of layoffs, which the spokesperson said happened last week, follow a handful of other layoffs made by the company since 2022. One was in May 2022 when it was reported at least 185 employees, or one-third of its workforce, were let go. Another was earlier this year.
It’s not clear how many employees the company had at the time of the layoffs or which roles were impacted.
The company, which provides software to retailers to speed up checkout, raised around $1 billion in total venture-backed funding and at one time was valued at $11 billion.
In October, CEO Maju Kuruvilla told TechCrunch that Bolt was working toward profitability and had some features, like improving merchandise returns and providing personalized experiences around its universal shopper network, in the pipeline. The company announced partnerships with retailers, including Saks OFF 5TH, Shinola, Filson, Lafayette 148 and Toys “R” Us, in November.
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Mary Rand, 83, spoke to Sky Sports News from her home in Nevada about her memories and her historic achievements from the 1964 Olympics in Tokyo
Mary Rand, 83, spoke to Sky Sports News from her home in Nevada about her memories and her historic achievements from the 1964 Olympics in Tokyo
Mary Rand was once the golden girl of British athletics, winner of the first track and field gold medal by a British female athlete at the 1964 Tokyo Olympics and still the only woman to win three track and field medals at the same Olympic Games.
Mary took top spot in the long jump with a world-record leap of 6.76m, then landed pentathlon silver and 4x100m relay bronze.
Almost 60 years later we tracked down the former darling of British athletics, to her home in Reno Nevada to get her thoughts and memories of those historic games. Now aged 83, Mary told us about how it all started for her in athletics.
“I was always a tomboy,” Mary tells Sky Sports.
“I always followed my brothers, and I think started out running around an orchard in Wells, Somerset. I eventually went to the All England Schools, that’s as far as you can go. I got a scholarship to Millfield and when I went there I had a coach, and the rest is history.”
Mary’s passion and natural ability for athletics is clear, and looking back on her achievement of becoming the first British woman to win an Olympic gold medal, she modestly says: “I was doing something I really loved to do and I was fortunate enough to meet really good people along the way who really helped me. When I won I couldn’t quite believe it really because at that point I had a daughter that was two years old.”
Rand came away from Tokyo with three Olympic medals
Things, however, were not that simple for the Somerset native. At the 1960 Games in Rome four years earlier, a disappointing Olympics saw her return to England to newspaper headlines which read ‘Flop, flop, flop’.
Not discouraged by those past headlines, Mary, then 24 and a mother to two-year-old daughter Alison, was determined to put it right in Japan.
Mary recalls the day of her historic jump clearly.
“The morning that I was going to compete I was sharing a room with Anne Packer, Mary Peters and Pat Nutting and hailstones were coming down. I looked out and went, ‘oh my lord it’s hailing’, but then I thought to myself, ‘well, it’s the same for everybody, they’ve all got to compete in it’. I was very fortunate that I qualified with my first jump so I could go right back in and stay out of the rain.”
Rand tries on a pair of FCA (Cuban Athletics Federation) earrings in 1965
Fortunate with the weather maybe, but there was no fortune with her jumping in that final in Tokyo. Five of Mary’s six jumps broke the Olympic record but, as she recalls, records were the last thing on her mind.
“You don’t really think about anything except what you’re going to do. You’re hoping you’re going to run down the runway and hit that little board at the end and get a good jump,” she adds.
Well, Mary did that and more and no one in the stadium was more surprised that she broke the world record than she was.
“When I came back and I had jumped the world record, I couldn’t understand it because it was in metres and back then we didn’t do metres. When it went up on the board it said 6.76m and underneath it said ‘world record’.
“I was blown away,” Mary chuckles to herself at her recollection of the moment.
Gold in the long jump was to be the pinnacle of Mary’s achievements in Tokyo but she also ended up coming home with a silver in the pentathlon and a bronze in the 4x100m relay. Her medals are kept at her old school and that is where Mary thinks they belong.
“They’re at Millfield in Somerset, they got a big display case and it’s really nice. I think that’s where they belong because it is part of history and it might inspire young athletes when they see that to do better.”
Rand competing in the long jump at White City
Mary’s achievements are even more remarkable when put into context. There were no million-pound contracts, she did not have the carefully-selected diets and use of cutting-edge equipment that athletes have today; she was just like any other ‘working mum’. Mary worked eight hours a day at a Guinness factory and cheekily says it was a half pint of the well-known stout that was the secret of her success.
“I really went there because they would give me time off when I had an international meet and they also paid me my salary when I was away. I was lucky! Guinness was amazing to me. Every lunchtime I had half a Guinness.”
Rand posing at a photoshoot in 1969
Mary was a trailblazer in the sixties. She was one of the icons that made London the place to be in that decade – one journalist described her as ‘Marilyn Monroe on spikes’.
She was not only the darling of the print media but also mixed with pop royalty. Mick Jagger even said she was his dream date. Sitting in her home she remembers that time with fondness.
“I was at the BBC one day and the Beatles were there. I met two of them, Ringo and George I think, And then Mick Jagger, I never actually met him, but they asked him if he could go on a date with anybody and he said it would be me. I don’t know if that was good or bad but anyway that’s what he said”.
Jagger, like the rest of the nation, was captivated by Mary, a pathfinder for women’s sport in this country. She was feted for her athletic achievements and won the Sports Personality of the Year award in 1964.
Rand competes at the Southern Counties Women’s Athletics Championships
“At the time I didn’t know what affect it would have, but I think what you would hope for is that when you do something like that, it’s going to inspire young athletes to want to train and do well. And also to think, ‘she did it so there is no reason that we can’t do that’.”
