"It's very important that I show up as my authentic self," Shelly-Ann Fraser-Pryce says. Photo / AFP
It has been almost a year since footage of Shelly-Ann Fraser-Pryce crushing the rest of the field in the mum’s race at her son’s sports day went viral.
Now basking in the glow of retirement, Fraser-Pryce – the most decorated female sprinter in history – is only too happy to return to the scene of this sporting triumph when we meet in Madrid, but flashes a wry smile at my ignorance when I ask her whether she was jogging.
“Absolutely not! It’s very important that I show up as my authentic self,” she tells the Daily Telegraph in her Jamaican lilt.
Fraser-Pryce was persuaded to race by her 7-year-old son, Zyon. As a then 38-year-old athlete in the twilight of her career, and with one eye on remaining fit and healthy for the World Championships six months down the line, she did not want to risk an untimely injury. But her initial absence on the starting line was somewhat controversial.
“Sports day is a huge day in Jamaica,” Fraser-Pryce says. “It’s an opportunity for parents to feel like athletes. I told my son, ‘I’m not running today’. I got there at lunchtime. He ran over, he was so excited, and asked, ‘Mummy, are you running the parent race? You have to!’
“He brought his friends – they were little instigators – and they said: ‘Aunty Shelly, you have to run! Our house needs it, we need the points.’ So I agreed. I warmed up. All the other mums said they had trained for the race. I told them, ‘Girls, I’m not jogging!’ I ran hard. I always give it 100%.”
That relentless attitude frames much of Fraser-Pryce’s illustrious career. Since bowing out of the sport last September in Japan, the third-fastest woman in history is embracing her new life as a “soccer mum”.
“I’ve traded my spikes for cleats,” she says.
“Now I have to stand in the goal at home while Zyon takes shots. Or sometimes it’s the other way round; he’s in goal and I’m kicking the ball at him. He’s the one who keeps me on my toes. I say: ‘Please remember, Mummy’s retired now. I want to rest.’ He doesn’t let me rest.”
Standing at five feet (1.54m), the diminutive Fraser-Pryce, who earned the moniker “Pocket Rocket” for the remarkable explosiveness that made her a giant of her sport, might not be blessed with the physical attributes of a traditional goalkeeper. Not that she gives this much thought, considering how most of her week is taken up ferrying Manchester United-obsessed Zyon to and from football practice and tournaments, where she blends in with the other parents watching from the sidelines.
“It’s been a joy to be able to walk alongside him,” Fraser-Pryce says. “The hardest part about being an elite sprinter or athlete is trying not to infringe on his journey as much as possible. The moment I get to his training sessions or his tournaments and I’m coaching him from the sidelines and he’s like: ‘Be quiet! Mummy, shhhh. Don’t talk.’ It’s hard to navigate the space of allowing him to chase his own dream while being the mother I can to him.”
‘When I got pregnant I was scared’
Moving the dial around motherhood ultimately secured Fraser-Pryce’s legacy. She was the first mother in 24 years to claim a global 100 metres title when she triumphed at the 2019 World Championships in Doha, little more than two years after giving birth. She would make a further three 100m podiums.
No other track sprinter has achieved such sporting excellence after childbirth, although there are numerous others who have shown glimpses of what is possible. Alysia Montaño, of the United States, famously competed when she was 34 weeks pregnant in 2014 but by the time Fraser-Pryce conceived three years later, the female athletes who had been through pregnancy and returned to sport were still few and far between.
“When I got pregnant I was so scared,” Fraser-Pryce admits. “I didn’t see a lot of women stepping out [of athletics] to have kids and coming back. You use that and I was so nervous and scared. But I’m glad the conversation and the narrative has shifted to support women who decide that motherhood is something they want but also still want to do track.
“It’s still something that is ongoing and the conversation has to continue. We still have a long way to go but we have made changes and that’s a plus for me.”
By proving that motherhood does not have to spell the end of a career, Fraser-Pryce has transcended her own sport. In tennis, current world No 1 and four-time grand slam champion Aryna Sabalenka, who was crowned sportswoman of the year at the 2026 Laureus World Sports Awards in Madrid on Monday night, has expressed her own desire to return to professional tennis after starting a family.
“I met Aryna in Portland last year at the Oregon Nike Campus,” Fraser-Pryce, who earlier this month became a Laureus ambassador and scooped the same award in 2023, says. “She was full of life, energy and personality. I love how she is unapologetically herself. Women athletes sometimes diminish our individuality and our personality because they’re afraid of being criticised for being aggressive or whatever it is. She’s a competitor.”
‘A lot of tears after Paris’
Fraser-Pryce has always been a beacon of positivity and a pillar of self-expression with her brightly-coloured hair. But at the Paris Olympics – her fifth and final Olympic Games – her world unexpectedly came crashing down. Her build-up had been far from ideal after suffering a torn hamstring during the 4x100m relay at the 2023 World Championships in Budapest. She completed her leg of the race but was in such pain afterwards that she was offered a wheelchair. Fraser-Pryce refused.
“I hate showing weakness,” she says. “I remember walking off the field and I said to myself, ‘Do not fall, do not drop.’ I didn’t want anyone seeing me in that moment.”
After that, she took two months off running. In a bid to accelerate her recovery, she had platelet-rich plasma injections in her hamstring and began to make real progress. Reynaldo Walcott, her coach, was stunned when she ran an “impossible” time over 80 metres a few months out from the Olympics and she headed to the event confident.
And then Paris happened. After blitzing her 100m heat in 10.92sec – a time that eventual bronze medallist Melissa Jefferson would only match – Fraser-Pryce looked nailed-on to make a fifth Olympic podium. But she ended up withdrawing from her semi-final under a cloud of controversy after being denied access to the warm-up area. Her unexpected absence sent the rumour-mill whirring, which intensified after footage of her emerged on social media in conversation with a bus driver near the stadium.
In an interview last year, Fraser-Pryce revealed that she had a suspected panic attack, although it was a hamstring injury that led to her decision to pull out. Just more than 19 months on, the memory is still raw.
“It was the same routine I had done the day before,” Fraser-Pryce says. “This lady comes and tells me the rules have changed. I like rules. Rules are fine, but you can’t change a rule and then not advise that they’ve been changed.
“It was so hard because there was no compassion behind the young lady who was at the gate. She couldn’t understand what we were saying. She was saying that we had to walk all the way back to the stadium with my bag to come back to this area. I had a race in less than three hours. It wasn’t the moment I envisioned for myself. I felt let down by the organisation.”
The sour experience left her bereft, and questioning whether she wanted to carry on competing at all. Her gut instinct told her she was not yet ready to retire, so she returned for one more season for one last dance.
“Leaving Paris, there were a lot of tears. It took many weeks to grieve the process. So there was a lot of emotion heading into Tokyo for the last one [the World Championships]. But this was on my terms. There’s a saying in Jamaica ‘There’s some hills I prefer dying on’ and this was one of them. I felt empowered by making it.”
She won a silver medal in the relay last year in Japan, the same country where she burst on to the world scene 18 years earlier. For a woman who has always marched to her own beat, it was a fitting end to an extraordinary career. But when it comes to the parents race at school sports day, you sense Fraser-Pryce is just getting started.
– Telegraph UK