To this day, Florence Griffith Joyner remains the fastest woman on earth and the world’s most recognizable sprinter.
Known for her flamboyant style, controversy still plagues the late sprinter as some say she used performance-enhancing steroids to break world records.
So, what’s the truth behind Flo-Jo’s success? Was she a cheat or history’s fastest fashionista? On your mark, get set, go… as we dive into Flo-Jo’s fascinating and tragic story.
A Star Is Born
Flo-Jo was born Florence Delorez Griffith in Los Angeles, California, on December 21st, 1959. The seventh of 11 children, her mother was also called Florence and worked as a seamstress. Her father, Robert, was an electrician.
Both parents earned extra money doing odd jobs for friends and neighbors in and around Watts. Needless to say, life for an African-American family in the late 1950s and 1960s was tough. The Griffiths did the best they could, but they always struggled financially.
Eleven Kids
The Griffith family originally lived in the Sun Village community of Littlerock, north of Los Angeles, but when her parents split up and later divorced, Florence Senior raised her eleven children single-handedly.
The devoted mother moved her 11 kids to the Jordan Downs housing projects in the predominantly African-American neighborhood of Watts, Los Angeles, and continued her work as a seamstress. They didn’t know it, but their community was about to be rocked to the core…
The Watts Riots
In the summer of 1965, when Florence was just six years old, police arrested a 21-year-old African American man by the name of Marquette Frye and hit him in the face with a baton. When the African-American community protested Frye’s arrest and mistreatment, the infamous Watts Riots ensued.
Living in Watts, Florence witnessed these renowned civil rights riots. Growing up in Watts’s projects with 10 siblings gave Florence Junior all the ingredients to reach for the stars. She was athletic, competitive, and fashionable.
Two Passions
The young girl quickly developed an interest in two hobbies that shaped her life – athletics and fashion. From around the age of seven, “Dee Dee,” as her friends and family called her, began borrowing her mother’s sewing machine and experimented with making her own running clothes.
If she wanted to be a sprinter, she knew she had to have the right outfit. So, the young sprinter designed and sewed her own running outfits, which she would later become famous for.
Sibling Rivalry
Flo-Jo’s will to succeed came from her rivalry with her rough-and-tumble brothers. She once told sports journalist Ann Liguori, “My brothers… they made me very competitive because they would knock me down, and I couldn’t cry.”
She continued, “If I cried, I wasn’t allowed to continue to play with them, so they helped me as far as my competitive edge is concerned. And in the world of fashion, because they didn’t want me to look like a boy and be out there playing.”
Jesse Owens National Youth Games
As a teenager, the talented young athlete signed up with the Sugar Ray Robinson Youth Foundation, where she played a variety of sports – including basketball, volleyball, and football. But Flo-Jo excelled at track running, and she soon started training as a sprinter and long jumper.
Her raw, natural talent as an athlete made it plain that she was going places. When she competed in the Jesse Owens National Youth Games aged 14 and 15, she took home the gold medal two years running. Suddenly, coaches began to take notice.
Meeting Bob Kersee
By the time Flo-Jo graduated from Jordan High School in 1978, she had set high-school records in sprinting and long jump. She even talked her high school relay teammates into wearing long tights with their track uniforms.
When she competed in the CIF California State Meet, finishing in sixth place, she caught the eye of Bob Kersee. Now, Kersee happened to be California State Northridge’s coach. He would become Florence’s mentor and change her life forever.
Bank Teller
Flo-Jo quickly became integral to Bob Kersee’s national title-winning track program, but there was a catch. Her family struggled for money, so Flo-Jo was forced to drop out of Cal State Northridge. In 1979, she took a job as a bank teller to help her family.
Luckily, her coach came through for her. But, by 1980, Bob Kersee had been promoted to assistant coach at the University of California in Los Angeles so he could help his young protegee secure much-needed financial aid.
Meeting of Minds
By the spring of 1980, Flo-Jo Griffith finished fourth in the Olympic Trials 200-meter final and would have made the USA Olympic team. But it didn’t really matter as the USA boycotted the 1980 Moscow Olympics due to the Cold War.
However, while she was upset not to compete, there was a silver lining on the horizon. That same year, Flo-Jo met triple jumper Al Joyner. He later recalled, “I never saw a woman look like that before; she made me speechless.”
Winning Recipe
Flo-Jo trained with Al Joyner’s sister, heptathlon champion Jackie Joyner, who later married Coach Bob Kersee and became the USA’s most famous female track and field athlete. Today, the Griffith-Joyner-Kersee family remains one of the world’s most famous sporting families.
With help from her trainers, Flo-Jo started winning everything. UCLA won back-to-back national team titles as Griffith won the 1982 NCAA title, winning the 200 meters in 22.39 seconds, and the 1983 400-meter NCAA title in 50.94 seconds.
1984 Los Angeles Olympics
In 1983, Flo-Jo graduated from UCLA with a degree in psychology. The same year, she finished fourth in the 200m at the World Championships in Helsinki, Finland. The following year, at 1984’s Los Angeles Olympics, she made the USA Olympic team for the first time.
She took home the 200-meter silver medal in front of her hometown crowd in Los Angeles. Her friend and training partner Al Joyner also earned the gold medal by winning the triple jump.
Semi-Retirement
Flo-Jo was an Olympic medalist, but women’s track and field was not the multimillion-dollar sport it is nowadays. With little money available, Flo-Jo was forced into semi-retirement. She got her old job back as a bank teller and worked as a hairstylist and beautician in the evenings.
Painting nails and braiding hair was far more lucrative than athletics because Flo-Jo could earn $200 for intricate braids. As she placed running on the back burner, Flo’s dream looked like it was over…
Return to the Field
After a three-year hiatus, Flo-Jo finally ditched her job at the bank and the beauty parlor to make her return to athletics. In April 1987, she started training again, and her hard work paid off immediately.
Within four months, the most fashionable female athlete in town had won the silver medal in the 200-meter sprint at the 1987 World Championships in Rome. She didn’t just win her final; she won it in style, sporting a hooded body suit like speed skaters usually wear.
Love and Marriage
Flo-Jo had been engaged to hurdler Greg Foster, but he had called off the engagement in 1986. In October of the following year, Flo married Al Joyner, seven years after she first met him at the 1980 Olympic trials registration.
It was a match made in heaven, or maybe more aptly, Mount Olympus, where the Greek Gods lived. In marrying Al Joyner, Florence had officially joined the USA’s first family of track and field. From this point on, she would forever be known as Flo-Jo.
Weight Training
Inspired by Canadian sprinter Ben Johnson’s lightning-quick start out of the blocks at Rome in 1987, the husband-and-wife team incorporated weight training and overhauled Flo’s diet. She trained 12 hours a day, starting at 4 o’clock every morning!
The tiny athlete weighed 130 lbs but could squat 320 lbs. Al explained, “We bought a $150 leg exercise machine, and she did leg curls every night – more than 20 lbs every night – to build up the strength in her legs. She was working 12 hours a day.”
She Beat Her Husband
Flo-Jo maintained, “To run like a man, you have to train like a man.” Then, one summer’s day, Flo-Jo beat her husband in a race. Finally, the pair were confident she was ready to go toe-to-toe with the best just in time for the 1988 Olympics in Seoul.
However, Flo-Jo’s critics – of whom there were many – were certain her new physique was more than just training with weights and dieting. The haters suggested that the changes in Flo’s body and results were due to steroids.
1988 Olympic Trials
At 1988’s US Olympic Trials, Flo-Jo set a new 100-meter world record of 10.49 seconds, beating Evelyn Ashford’s previous record by 0.27 seconds. ABC announcer Marty Liquori could hardly believe she’d broken the world record, exclaiming, “No one can run that fast. The heat must be doing something to the electronics.”
One wind speed meter read 0.0. However, an identical meter a few meters away on the triple jump runway, read 4.3m/s. This was enough to void her new world record.
It Was No Fluke
Over the two-day trials, Flo-Jo blew her competition and her doubters away. In 24 hours, she recorded the three fastest 100-meter times for a female athlete in history, running 10.70 seconds in the semi-final and 10.61 in the final.
She also set an American record in the 200-meter with a time of 21.77 seconds. As Flo-Jo became the fastest woman on earth, Canadian sprinter Ben Johnson set a new world record of 9.83 seconds for the 100 meters.
Flo-Jo’s Prediction
The sprinter achieved this while wearing a different colorful outfit and sporting four-inch tiger stripe nails in each of her eight races. During one race, she wore a purple Adidas “one-legger” speed suit with turquoise bikini bottoms.
In her last race, she wore a revealing floaty white number, which she called her negligee. Flo-Jo revealed, “I’m a little bit surprised; my goal coming here was to go under 11-flat four times.” She went on to predict, “The world record will come in Seoul.”
Haters Gonna Hate
Flo-Jo wasn’t the only person who was surprised at her mercurial speed. Everyone seemed blown away by her times, including Ben Johnson, who influenced her weight training regimen.
The then-fastest man on the planet blurted out, “There’s no way Florence ran 10.49. I just don’t believe it. A 10.71, I would believe. That would have beaten me 10 years ago.” People couldn’t believe a woman was running almost as fast as the fastest man on earth.
New Coach and Manager
Flo-Jo trained with Coach Bob Kersee two days a week in preparation for the 1988 Olympic Trials, but she also trained with her husband Al three days a week. While this training regimen was undoubtedly working wonders, without warning, Flo-Jo left Bob Kersee as coach and manager after the Olympic trials in late July 1988.
However, leaving her coach of eight years wasn’t the only major change in Flo-Jo’s life before she hopped on a plane to South Korea.
She Swapped Colleges
Flo-Jo left UCLA – the University of California – for UC Irvine, south of Los Angeles. She installed her husband, Al Joyner, as her full-time coach and signed with personal and business manager Gordon Baskin.
Her new business manager signed several lucrative sponsorship deals ahead of the 1988 Summer Olympics. Suddenly, Flo-Jo was the talk of the town and everyone was interested to see if she could repeat her heroics at the Olympic Games. And sure enough, she blew her competitors away.
1988 Seoul Olympics
At the 1988 Olympics in Seoul, Flo-Jo ran the 100 meters in 10.54 seconds, beating compatriot Evelyn Ashford by 0.30 seconds. In the 200m semi-finals, she beat the world record by 0.15 seconds, and less than two hours later, she beat it again in the final by another 0.22 seconds.
She also won gold in the 4 × 100m relay and silver in the 4 × 400m relay for Team USA. And she did it all, sporting five-inch nails painted red, white, blue… and gold!
She Returned Home a Hero
Florence Griffith Joyner lit up the 1988 Seoul Olympics and returned home an athletics hero. With four Olympic medals – three gold and one silver – it was the highest tally since Dutch athlete Fanny Blankers-Koen, aka The Flying Housewife, won four gold medals at the 1948 London Olympics.
In one interview, Flo-Jo stated, “Conventional is not for me. I like things that are uniquely Flo. I like being different.” She also said that the outfits that the USA Olympic team gave their athletes were “so standard.”
Johnson Stripped of Medals
Florence Griffith Joyner wasn’t the only world record-breaking sprinter to compete in the Seoul Olympics. On September 24th, 1988, Canadian sprinter Ben Johnson beat defending champion Carl Lewis in the 100-meter final, setting a new world record of 9.79 seconds.
Yet just three days later, the Olympic Doping Control Center disqualified Ben Johnson after finding the banned steroid stanozolol was present in his urine. The disgraced Canadian admitted to using steroids, and the International Olympic Committee immediately stripped his medals.
Doping Claims
Soon, half the world claimed the reason Flo-Jo had bulked up from a former lightweight into a testosterone-fueled Amazonian queen and was suddenly breaking records was that she was taking performance-enhancing substances.
Her husband told CNN, “At first, when she beat the record, they said it was wind-assisted. Later, when she won the medals, they said it was drugs.” Carl Lewis told University of Pennsylvania students that “some very reliable sources” had told him Flo-Jo had been using steroids.
Darrell Robinson
In 1989, a former UCLA teammate, Darrell Robinson, claimed that he’d sold Flo-Jo 10ml of growth hormone for $2,000 the previous year. He said Joyner told him – “If you want to make $1 million, you’ve got to invest some thousands.”
Robinson also claimed to have received steroids from coach Bob Kersee and said he saw Carl Lewis take testosterone supplements. Flo-Jo called him Robinson a “compulsive, crazy, lying lunatic.” Al Joyner added, “If you listen to him, everyone’s on something. “He’s dirty, he’s going to say anything.”
Doping Tests
In 1988, Flo-Jo underwent 11 tests for performance-enhancing substances. She passed every single one. She stated, “I know exactly what people are saying about me, and it’s simply not true. I don’t need to use drugs. They can come and test me every week of the year. I’ve got nothing to hide.”
The IOC’s Medical Commission chairman, Prince Alexandre de Mérode, explained – “Since there were rumors… we performed all possible and imaginable analyses on her. We never found anything. There should not be the slightest suspicion.”
Sudden Retirement
Then, in February 1989, when Flo-Jo was at the top of her game, the 29-year-old athlete shocked the world by announcing her retirement at an emotional press conference at Madison Square Garden. The star cited new business opportunities because, since the Olympics, she had earned millions of dollars in endorsement deals.
She advertised Coca-Cola, designed clothes, set up a cosmetics firm, recorded fitness videos, wrote romance and childrens’ novels, appeared in sitcoms, and even had her own Flo-Jo Barbie doll, complete with its own “one-legger” speed suit.
Baby Mama
The doubters still targeted Flo-Jo, saying she had conveniently retired to dodge doping testing. While she retired just months before the introduction of mandatory random substance testing, she said she couldn’t “maintain her fitness with the constant travel required by the financial opportunities around her newfound fame.”
Later, Al revealed the real reason Flo had retired… They were trying to start a family of their own. And within 18 months, they had a daughter, Mary Ruth Joyner, on November 15th, 1990.
Talk of a Comeback
After Seoul, Florence waxed lyrical about making a comeback. She said she would defend her titles at the 1992 Barcelona Olympic Games and even said she was considering competing in the Olympic marathon.
When asked if she could beat her own world record, she said: “I do believe I can. When? I’m not sure, but I do feel I can go faster. I have to work on my start next year.” She was inducted into the USA Track & Field Hall of Fame in 1995.
Atlanta 1996
New mother Flo-Jo wanted to give back to her community, so she established the Flo-Jo Memorial Community Empowerment Foundation for underprivileged children. Former President Bill Clinton asked her to co-chair the President’s Council on Physical Fitness and Sports.
But she could never escape all these rumors of a comeback. As talk of an Olympic return swirled, Flo-Jo suffered an Achilles tendon injury that kept her out of contention from making a comeback for the Olympics on home turf in Atlanta in 1996.
Epileptic Seizure
However, Flo-Jo’s medical condition was about to get much worse than an Achilles injury. During a flight from California to St Louis in 1996, the star suffered from a seizure. She spent the night in hospital, but tests were inconclusive.
This was a massive worry as her mother had died without warning at age 38. It wasn’t the first time Flo-Jo had suffered a seizure. A family attorney later confirmed she had suffered a seizure in 1990 and had received treatment for seizures in 1993 and 1994.
Flo-Jo Passes Away
On September 21st, 1998, Florence Griffith Joyner passed away at her Californian home. Just like her mother, she was just 38 years old. Her heartbroken husband explained, “I was getting ready to take my daughter to school, and I hear my wife’s alarm clock. I turn off the alarm clock, and my wife’s not moving. It was devastating looking at my daughter. She was seven.”
Flo-Jo passed away from an epileptic seizure brought on by a brain abnormality, eventually suffocating facedown on her pillow.
One Final Doping Test
Critics claimed Flo-Jo’s sudden, unexpected, and early passing proved she had been taking performance enhancers. Her devoted husband, Al, had to grieve in front of the world’s media while waiting for the autopsy tests. The autopsy found no signs of steroid use.
Only after his late wife’s autopsy could Al mourn her passing, telling the media, “My wife took the final, ultimate drug test, and it’s what we always said – there’s nothing there. So please, please, just let my wife rest in peace.”
Flo-Jo’s Legacy
Flo-Jo’s remains were laid to rest in El Toro Memorial Park in Orange County, Los Angeles. Athletes, politicians, and celebrities paid their respects as tributes poured in from around the world. President Bill Clinton said, “We were dazzled by her speed, humbled by her talent, and captivated by her style.”
In 2000, her former school, 102nd Street School – located in the Watts neighborhood where she grew up – was renamed Florence Griffith Joyner Elementary School.
Sporting Legacy
Serena Williams wore a one-legger black and red catsuit in the 2021 Australian Open. That said, those in the tennis industry called it an ‘Asymmetric Tennis Unitard.’ Looking like she’d just stepped out of the 1980s, Serena told The Guardian newspaper, “I was inspired by Flo-Jo, who was a wonderful track athlete, amazing athlete, when I was growing up. Watching her fashion, just always changing. Her outfits were always amazing.”
Serena wasn’t the only one channeling Flo-Jo. Her daughter, Olympia, also wore a mini Flo-Jo-inspired asymmetric tennis unitard!
The Fastest Woman on Earth
Jamaica’s Usain Bolt broke the men’s 100m world record (9.58s) in 2009. Yet 36 years after the Seoul Olympics, Flo-Jo’s 1988 100-meter world record (10.49s) and 200m world record (21.34s) still stand.
Heading into the Paris 2024 Olympics, her fantastic feats remain the longest-reigning sprinting records in track and field history. Asterisks often appear next to her name because many athletic associations still won’t acknowledge her records. Yet through all the gossip and detractors, Flo-Jo never once failed a drug test.
Sha’Carri Richardson
In recent years, another colorful athlete has picked up Flo-Jo’s baton. Texan Sha’Carri Richardson stands just 5’1″, and like her heroine, she competes in the 100-meter and 200-meter races wearing colorful body suits and sporting long nails.
In August 2023, Sha’Carri won gold in the 100 meters at Budapest’s World Championships, setting a personal best of 10.65 seconds. Let’s see if she can beat Flo-Jo’s time at Paris 2024, where, thanks to Flo-Jo, even Olympic Villages have nail salons nowadays.
