Jamaica’s ‘pocket rocket’ with a golden touch
DOHA: Jamaican sprint legend Shelly-ann Fraser-pryce has already battled her way from abject poverty to a level of relative riches that will allow her to give her son Zyon a more comfortable upbringing than she experienced.
Yet the engaging 1.52 metres (5 foot) 32-year-old ‘pocket rocket’ is not done yet.
The enduring Fraser-pryce won the first of her two Olympic 100 metre titles in 2008. She has four individual World Athletics Championships golds. In 2013, in Moscow, she became only the third woman to achieve a sprint double and could repeat the historic feat in Doha.
Her main rivals for the 100m, which gets underway on Saturday, are likely to be compatriot Elaine Thompson and Briton Dina Asher-smith. Yet Fraserpryce is fortunate even to even be running after missing the 2017 season with a difficult pregnancy.
“Honestly, I think my son kind of put things in perspective, where I can say, ‘I’m OK, I have my son, now I’ve achieved so much, but I still want more,’” she told sports and pop culture website The Undefeated last year.
Fraser-pryce may want more from the track but she has plenty going on off it. She owns a hair salon -- not a great surprise given her penchant for dyeing her hair exotic colours. She also spends a lot of time talking to youngsters in her community about improving their lives.
“If you understand Shelly, she’s a behind-the-scenes person,” her local priest, Winston Jackson, told Jamaican newspaper The Gleaner in 2012.
“If she’s going to help somebody, she will do it in private. She doesn’t like all the excitement.”
Her work with children has a personal side after a childhood in a violent ghetto in Kingston -- a cousin was shot dead close to the family home -- but where she refused to accept her lot was to just survive.
Much of this steeliness was infused into her psyche by her mother, Maxine who brought up Shelly-ann her two brothers up on her own in the Waterhouse neighbourhood, telling her daughter: ‘you have a talent go and use it.’
“I love my community and I love the fact that this is where I’m from and even though sometimes it’s challenging to see some of the young people that I grew up with not making it, I want [them] to understand that I embody everything that we are,” she said.