CASTRIES, St Lucia — It was a moment of excitement and celebration across St Lucia on Saturday, after Julien Alfred stormed the 100m track at the 2024 Paris Olympic Games, securing not only a gold medal but also creating history by winning the country’s first-ever medal at an Olympics.

When the Jamaica Observer visited Ciceron, Alfred’s hometown, there was much jubilation, with residents dressed in their country’s colours dancing to local music and eating home-made specialities in recognition of the historic occasion.

Minister of tourism, investment, creative industries, and culture and parliamentary representative for Castries South, Ernest Hilaire said Alfred had a monumental task of representing the entire Caribbean.

“You can imagine the joy and elation we had seeing Julian not just win the first medal for St Lucia but a gold medal at that,” he told the Observer as he reacted to the race. “And with [Shelly-Ann] Fraser-Pryce out of the race, she had to carry the weight of the entire Caribbean on her shoulders because the last four Olympics were won by Jamaicans and we had to make sure, as the Caribbean, we kept the flag flying. So, a really special moment.”

Hilaire said the country would honour Alfred’s success in many ways.

“We will do a lot! People are already calling for the motorcades and the celebrations,” he said. “We are going to do a lot. We are going to celebrate this one; more than the two Nobel prizes that we received… There will be that [a national holiday] and more.”

Local residents were overjoyed and beamed with pride as they partook in the celebrations.

“On behalf of the entire community of Ciceron I would like to say how immensely proud we are of Julien on this wonderful and remarkable accomplishment that she was able to win, being the first female hailing out of the island of St Lucia to be able to acquire a medal at an international stage as prestigious as the Olympics. I think that’s an accomplishment that we as St Lucians, and Caribbean individuals collectively, should be proud of and rally around her — even though she might not be from Jamaica, even though she might be from another Caribbean country — but I feel that the mere fact that she is a Caribbean inhabitant, I think that we should all be proud of her,” said Hodgeson Duncan.

Duncan’s sister, Eartha, said Alfred’s win came as a surprise.

“I am very proud of Julien, since I thought Sha’Carri [Richardson] would have won the race…,” she said. “I am happy that Julien won but I really wanted to see exactly what would happen on the track, because Sha’Carri is determined. I have known Julien since she was a child; I never expected this. To be honest, I really wanted St Lucia to win but I didn’t expect Julien to win by such a big margin.”

For commentator Terry Finisterre, Alfred’s triumph in the 100m final comes after a series of difficulties.

“I mean obviously later, it’s the culmination of a lot of hard work, a lot of hard knocks, really because she’s gone through some serious difficulties throughout her life — losing her father, having to move out of St Lucia to go to school in Jamaica and then to Texas,” he explained.

“Her first real breakthrough season in Texas, she was running at her best, running pretty much world-standard times as a junior. And then she was hit by COVID-19 on the cusp of national championships. Her second season thereafter, 2021, she was hit by injury again, running at or near her best. She started to come through, of course, in 2022 — got the Commonwealth silver medal, made the World Championships semi-final, and then again, false-starting out of the World Championships semi-final at Oregon 2022.

“So again, she’s gone through so much over the past years that what we’re seeing from 2023 to now — the World Indoor Championships gold medal and then, of course, taking the Olympic gold medal — her just desert after so much trauma, so much pain, so much difficulty in her life.”

Alfred, who spent part of her secondary educational journey at Jamaica’s St Catherine High School, displayed some athletic potential in her junior years.

“When she was at CAC [Central American and Caribbean] Juveniles [Games] in the Under-15 Championships, she took the gold medals and set a number of records along the way,” Finisterre said. “She was scouted at the time by a Jamaican coach at St Catherine. He brought her across, made arrangements with her coach, her family here, and, of course, the Government of St Lucia to provide support for her along the way during her time at St Catherine. So, she spent quite a while at St Catherine.

Interestingly, I mean, she’s got a Commonwealth Youth gold medal and got a silver medal at the World Youth Olympics but at the Carifta Games she does not have any sort of record to speak of. She has, I think, just one medal from Champs — that was silver behind Kevona Davis of Edwin Allen at the time — so she’s not really somebody who, as a junior, she showed her potential. She was there, she definitely had the ability to do a lot more, but she was not necessarily taking the world by storm, as it were, as a junior.”

Although not a favourite for the 200m race, Finisterre believes Alfred will deliver.

“I know her camp, I know her coach, [Edrick] Floreal, and I know that their focus is on going back for the 200m. She’s not as highly favoured and not as highly fancied in the 200m. She’s a classy 200m runner, more so indoors, but she’s capable, I think, of going out there and putting another medal in at the 200m.”