Flo-Jo, the woman that even the fastest living woman Shericka Jackson couldn’t
“The fastest living woman!” The commentator would boom just as Jamaica’s Shericka Jackson blurred along the track, arms pumping, knees kicking, to an incredible time of 21:45 to take gold at the World Athletic Championship. She still would be the second-fastest woman in history. The fastest was the great Florence Griffith Joyner, aka Flo Jo, who lived a fast dreamy life as a runner, a free spirit, an ebullient fashionista who the famous singer Beyonce would nod her respects to, once wearing a ‘flo-jo’ costume, and who died tragically young, in her sleep after an epileptic attack, a death that she had premonitions about for a while. They say it’s better to die young than fade away and Flo Jo unfortunately became its most famous symbolic figure. But boy could she run. Her life is quite a story.
Championship record ✔️
Second fastest time in history ✔️@sherickajacko ?? is the world 200m champion in 21.45!#WorldAthleticsChamps pic.twitter.com/Bs1IfadT1F— World Athletics (@WorldAthletics) July 22, 2022
Controversies tailed her. No one could catch her on the track; plenty tried off it. Her fans would say she ran like the wind; critics said she was wind-aided. Her power was feted around the world; some whispered it was drug-fuelled. Her style made the world go gaga; the haters mocked the six-inch vibrant fingernails. Beyonce wore her bodysuit; they said Flo-Jo’s career was a case of style over substance. She retired in 87’ to have a child; they said she ran away in fear of dope-tests. She never failed a single drug test. She was tested 11 times in Seoul alone, nothing illegal was found. She had premonitions about death, knew only death could catch her; and it did.
But her last act was her greatest posthumous run. With her death, and his second marriage, a promise that she had wrung out of him during her premonitions, her daughter Mary had started to drift in life. As a 7-year old, with her father a broken man, it was Mary who called the near and dear ones to tell about her mother’s death. The mother’s void would catch up with her, and she drifted into teenage years, distant and gripped by blues.
It was then her father produced Flo-Jo’s letters to her – labelled “not to be opened until you turn 16”- and joy for life returned to Mary. She became a singer-songwriter, performer, and she sang at the Olympic track and field trials in 2012. It’s her mother, who was the rockstar of track and field, though.
Incredibly, in 1985, after she had won gold at the ’84 Olympics, Flo Jo was working at a bank. The training and runner’s life had receded, and her main side hustle was styling – manicuring nails, fashioning clothes. She had started off as a bank teller before cashing her fortune at the tracks, but once again receded to the grey banking world. She would do her friends’ nails and hair in the night, charging 45$ to 200$ for intricate braiding.
Overweight (her coach would say she was 60 pounds heavier), but unburdened by the world, she was living her life when her coaches, the husband Al Joyner and his brother in law Bob Kersee stirred her into action. Her husband Al, whom she met in 1980 and married in ’87, was a triple-jump Olympic champion and brother of Olympic heptathlon and long-jump legend Jackie Joyner-Kersee.
The marriage propelled her to return to tracks. She would work out at 4 am. Moved by the Canadian Ben Johnson’s power start at the 1987 World Championships, Al had her ramp up her weight training. Reportedly, weighing 130 pounds, she could squat 320 pounds. “To run like a man, you need to train like a man,” she would say.
But before the epic running in Seoul 88, came the fashionista. “Dress good to look good. Look good to feel good. And feel good to run fast!” she would say. Six inch acrylic nails materialised, the hair flowed, face sparkled with makeup and her self-designed running kits were a rage – from one-legged bodysuits, hooded speed-skating bodysuits, colour-blocked bikini bottoms, detailed lace-onesies, and asymmetrical outfits. Flamboyance had a second name: Flo Jo.
The fashion sense was innate. She could knit, sew, and crochet. From 7, she was flirting with her own designer clothes. Around the late 70’s, early 80s, before she had become famous, she would run in New York and caught the eye of the famous running coach Pat Connolly who once wrote about that moment in NYT: “She was so pretty, my eyes often followed her as she jogged by. I had to control an urge to engage her in conversation, to ask if she was a singer. There were no outrageous fingernails or hair styles yet; no one-legged tights; no layers of make-up; no bulging muscles to power strong mechanical strides. What I saw was an intensity in her dark eyes, the kind that comes from hunger; the kind that revealed that this young woman had heart.”
And her heart was free and quirky.
“You can wear…
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