Sha’Carri Richardson Wins Her Third National Title and Says She’s Finally Back

Sha’Carri Richardson won her third national title in the women’s 100m on Friday night, running a season best 10.77 seconds at the 2026 USATF Outdoor Track and Field Championships at Icahn Stadium in New York. She got off to a slow start out of the blocks but closed hard, pulling away from her own training partner Kayla White to win by 0.13 seconds. The title adds to the ones she already won in 2023 and 2024, and it puts her back in the position she has spent the last year trying to reclaim.

That last part is what makes this win different from the first two. Richardson dealt with an injury setback heading into the 2025 season and missed the cut for the 100m finals at last year’s USATF championships entirely. For a sprinter who won a world title in 2023 and took Olympic silver in Paris in 2024, that kind of absence does not go unnoticed. She spent a full year answering questions about where she went and whether she would find her way back.

Friday night was her answer. Richardson sat criss cross on the ground after the race, still catching her breath, and told NBC it feels phenomenal to be back in a better place, healthy mentally, physically and emotionally, and that it shows hard work pays off. She talked about remembering who she is, about consistency, about being determined to be better every single day. Those are not throwaway lines after a win. They are the language of someone who spent a year rebuilding, not just her body, but her belief that she could get back to this level at all.

The run itself carries real historical weight. Her 10.77 tied her with Olympic gold medalist Carmelita Jeter for the most 100m national titles by a woman since 2000. That is not a small comparison. Jeter is one of the most decorated American sprinters of her era, and Richardson now stands next to her in a category that only a handful of women have ever touched. She did it at 26, with a legitimate injury year sitting between her second and third titles, which makes the number mean more than it would if the wins had simply stacked up back to back.

Richardson was not the only story at Icahn Stadium that night. Noah Lyles won his own third national title in the men’s 100m, matching his personal best and Paris Olympic gold time of 9.79 seconds, and doing it in the same building on the same night. Both sprinters had rough patches in 2025. Lyles was slowed by an ankle injury that spring and lost a global championship 100m for the first time at any level, finishing third at Worlds behind two Jamaican runners. Watching both of them win national titles in the same session, after both of them spent a year fighting through setbacks, gave Friday night a shared sense of return that neither athlete could have scripted on their own.