Julien Alfred Tunes Up For Paris

World Athletics Indoor 60m women’s champion, Julien Alfred is facing a busy month ahead of the Paris Olympics.

The 23-year-old from Ciceron will officially start her campaign at the Stade De France on 2 August, with Round 1 of the women’s 100m. That event will get started from 5:50 a.m. Saint Lucian time. 

The following day, Saturday 3 August, she will carry the hopes of 180,000 of her fellow countrymen, as the final of the women’s 100 starts at 3:20 p.m.

In her first full year as a professional, we are seeing less of Alfred. In 2023, she endured the rigour of the NCAA circuit, competing virtually every week for the University of Texas. In between, of course, she made collegiate history. 

Under the guidance of Coach Edrick Floreal, the 2022 Caribbean Games champion and Commonwealth Games silver medallist broke multiple records en route to winning five collegiate titles, ending the season as the first Caribbean woman to lift the Bowerman Award as the year’s best collegian track and field athlete. 

This year, with a more relaxed schedule, she won Saint Lucia’s first world title – 60m gold in Glasgow, Scotland at the the World Indoor Championships.

She’s not been on track since the beginning of June, when she ran 10.78 seconds to set a new national record for the 100m. But with her first Olympics looking, the time has come to ramp up her preparations.

First will be the event at which she made her professional debut in 2023, handing American champion Sha’Carri Richardson her only defeat for the season. Richardson, of course, would go on to win the World title in the 100m.

The Gyulai István Memorial – Hungarian Athletics GP, is the next stop on the World Athletics Continental Tour Gold. The meet will be held on 9 July in Székesfehérvár, Hungary.

Thence, Alfred is scheduled to make two stops on the Wanda Diamond League as she tunes up for the purple tracks of Paris.

The ninth Wanda Diamond League meeting of the season is in Monaco, the Herculis EBS Monaco, on 12 July. The Stade Louis II Great Britain’s will see Alfred facing off against training partner Dina Asher-Smith and Ivorian legend Marie-Josée Ta Lou in the women’s 100m.

Then, six days before the Olympic Games Opening Ceremony, is the London Athletics Meet, which will see the return of the world’s best athletes following a record-breaking sell-out in 2023. The tenth meeting of the 2024 Wanda Diamond League series, it is the UK’s biggest one-day athletics event.

The Wanda Diamond League series comprises 15 meetings in total across four different continents and started with Xiamen (China) on 20 April.

It concludes with a single final across two days in Brussels (13-14 September). Each of the 14 series meetings will be broadcast globally in a live two-hour programme.