Once she got to warm-up, Fraser-Pryce felt her body \u201cshutting down\u201d due to leg muscle cramps in her final two reps on the track, Marie Claire reported.<\/p>\n
Both in that article and again on Friday, Fraser-Pryce said she believed she had a panic attack.<\/p>\n
\u201cI felt like that moment was just taken from me,\u201d she said Friday, reflecting on Paris. \u201cWhether it\u2019s the circumstances, things like that, I believe I didn\u2019t get the opportunity to really just do what I know I could have done in that moment. And it was hurtful. It was the first time in my entire career that I\u2019ve never been able to step to a line to compete. And if anyone knows me, it doesn\u2019t matter what\u2019s happening, I\u2019m going to be at the line. And not being able to be at that line to compete was heartbreaking for me. It was something I had to deal with for a couple of months after Paris.\u201d<\/p>\n
Fraser-Pryce chose not to end her career on that note. <\/p>\n
She realized that the 2025 World Championships are in the same country where she made her global championship debut at the 2007 Worlds in Osaka. She brought that up in an opening address Friday.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s such a privilege to be able to do things on my own terms,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
Fraser-Pryce grew up in the Waterhouse neighborhood of Kingston, sharing one bed with her mom and two brothers and running barefoot until a teacher bought her spikes in grade six.<\/p>\n
(Fraser-Pryce conjured that upbringing in a June speech at an event honoring her career. \u201cIt is my mandate to make sure that every single student at the primary level in this country will never run barefoot at the National Stadium,\u201d said the founder of the Pocket Rocket Foundation<\/a>.)<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/a><\/p>\n Shelly-Ann Fraser-Pryce, a two-time Olympic 100m gold medalist, will retire after her 2025 season.<\/p>\n \u201cI was just a teeny-tiny thing in this wide, wondrous world,\u201d she wrote in \u201cI am a Promise,\u201d her 2020 autobiographical children\u2019s book that Jamaican Prime Minister Andrew Holness read to students<\/a>. \u201cAs tiny as I was, I was also very fast and I loved to run. So I ran to school. I ran to the shop. I ran like a rocket. I ran to be free. I ran everywhere because that was me.\u201d<\/p>\n By 2007, Fraser-Pryce, then 20, was fifth at the Jamaican Championships to earn the last spot on the Osaka Worlds team. She traveled 8,000 miles to race once \u2014 in the preliminary heats of the 4x100m relay, ultimately earning a silver medal.<\/p>\n The next year, Fraser-Pryce broke 11 seconds for the first of 87 times in her career to finish runner-up at nationals, earning her first individual 100m start at a global championship at the Beijing Olympics.<\/p>\n She went into the Games tied for third in the world by best time that year. <\/p>\n \u201cMy goals were to make the final,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n On Aug. 17, 2008, Fraser-Pryce (then Fraser, with braces) blasted out of the Bird\u2019s Nest starting blocks and won by two tenths of a second — the second-largest margin in the last 60 years after Florence Griffith-Joyner in 1988. She was the youngest Olympic women\u2019s 100m champion in 44 years.<\/p>\n From 2008 through 2022, Fraser-Pryce won seven of the 11 global 100m titles between the Olympics and worlds. In 2017, she watched the world championships on TV, then gave birth to son Zyon the day after the 100m final. She won the next world title two years later.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Fraser-Pryce felt she ‘could do anything’ in 2019<\/p>\n Shelly-Ann Fraser-Pryce reflects on the 2019 World Track and Field Championships, where she won the women’s 100m, and the significance of achieving that feat while being a mother over 30 at the time.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n