Yendi Phillips

“I came back home with a fire,” the 33-year-old icon told former Miss Jamaica Universe and Miss Universe runner-up Yendi Phillips on Phillips’ YouTube show Odyssey.

In the video that has so far garnered almost 55,000 views, Fraser-Pryce revealed that when she joined MVP Track Club, she was still not certain that a career in track and field is what she wanted to pursue.

Even when she was selected to be a member of the Jamaican team, she was still uncertain that this was her path in life.

“I only wanted to go, to go. I was so nervous. I was unsure of who I was at the time…still wasn’t sure what I wanted to do,” she said.

“If anybody had asked me at the time what I wanted to do, I wouldn’t say an athlete. It was just there; an opportunity.”

Her indecision about what path she wanted to follow manifested in how she trained during those early days.

“I got to training late most days, didn’t go to the gym because me did believe me was a go get tough. I went to practise and never completed the workouts. That changed when I went to the World Championships,” she said.

However, before the change occurred, Osaka proved to be quite difficult for the then 19-year-old upstart from Wolmer’s Girls. In Japan, she was a member of Jamaica’s 4x100m relay team that won the silver medal that year.

However, when she was told that she was running she said she cried because she didn’t want to run. The occasion also unsettled her.

“Separate and apart from that you’re thinking that this is a big thing and I didn’t want to mess it up,” she said.

History will recall that she did not mess things up. Instead, a new reality dawned on her.

“I think what it did for me was that I saw something different. It is almost as if my eyes opened up to a reality that ‘them people ya wuk hard, you nuh’. You see the grit, the glory, you see defeat, you see so many different things, emotions, people crying when they crossed the line.”

It wasn’t all bad though. There were great benefits to being a member of a medal-winning team.

She remembers sitting in the stands cheering teammate Veronica Campbell chasing down the USA’s Tori Edwards but just coming up short at the line. The USA won gold in 41.98 while Jamaica was a mere 0.03s behind in 42.01. Belgium was third.

She happy for what was her first medal but also because “Me inna di money,” she said laughing.

As a member of the relay squad, Fraser-Pryce collected her share of US$40,000.

 There was a national outcry for Campbell-Brown to replace the greenhorn from the MVP Track Club. Surely, she would not be able to go to Beijing and do better than Campbell-Brown, the seasoned campaigner who won gold over 200m in Athens four years before and the 100m title in Osaka in 2007.

Stung by the naysayers calling for her head Fraser silenced them by becoming the first Jamaican woman to win an Olympic 100m title as Jamaica finished 1-2-2 in the finals. She would go on to win another Olympic 100m title four years later in London and just last year won an unprecedented fourth 100m title in Doha in 2019.

A 200m World title and an Olympic 200m silver medal have cemented her a legacy as arguably Jamaica’s greatest female sprinter and one of the best of all time.

She now says that she forgives those naysayers because she understands why they did.

"I’m not gonna say I blame them. I cannot because at the time Veronica was a sure thing,” Fraser-Pryce said during an interview with Yendi Phillips on her YouTube show Odyssey, Untold Journeys with Yendi.

“Looking back now I cannot say I would have sit down in my days and be at home and somebody say ‘Veronica naw run’ and me would a probably take that. Me woulda say ‘No, mi waan Veronica run,” said the four-time 100m World Champion.

“I remember watching that Olympics, 2004 Olympics, at home. Veronica was the standard. So I cannot imagine that they would have said anything different and I understand.

 I have forgiven all of that. I have moved on because I understand that while it shouldn’t have happened based on the rules, I understand where everybody was coming from and I think at the end of the day, I’m glad that I was able to open the doors for younger athletes to understand that anything that you set out to achieve, your age, it don’t matter. When you’re ready, you show up, and you go out there and you go after it.”