EUGENE, Ore. — If, like most of America, you watched the women’s 400 here at the U.S. track and field Trials a few days ago, and your takeaway was Allyson Felix and her cute daughter, Cammy, and Quanera Hayes and her cute son, Demetrius, and the way the new moms celebrated finishing 1-2 with their kids on the track, Wadeline Jonathas would like you to know that she finished third and she matters just as much, and, for real no knock on anyone else, but if you could tear yourself over this way, you would see the very essence of what it means, really, to be an American, to make it in this country, to represent the United States, red, white and blue, all of that, in the 21st century.
Wadeline Jonathas — Wadie, please — is an immigrant from Haiti. She came to the United States when she was 11. Became an American citizen when she was 17. She didn’t even start running track until she was 16. Didn’t take up the 400 until she was 18. She’s now 23 and going to the Olympics.
Everyone has a story. This is the lesson of Wadeline Jonathas. In her case, it borders on the is-this-for-real? Answer: it’s 100 percent real because there’s so much more to it. At 15, she was homeless. They should make a movie out of The Wadeline Jonathas Story. “One day,” she said with a laugh.
Wadeline Jonathas after the women’s 400 Trials final // Getty Images
It’s one of the manifest realities of the Trials, indeed most large-scale sporting events (Super Bowl, college football playoff, you get the idea), that legions of reporters and broadcasters stampede like lemmings in pursuit of what in the trade is called a “storyline” — a group-driven narrative that lends itself to a preordained approach to the action.
In the women’s 400, it was Felix, chasing her fifth Olympics. To be clear, that was by any measure a wholly legitimate story, particularly given the hardships Felix had endured since Rio. Then, when Hayes snuck in for the win, suddenly there were two moms. A new storyline!
The challenge is that focusing entirely on the storyline means there’s little to no oxygen for anything else.
Like the story of Wadeline Jonathas.
Which is entirely unfair to her, to the sport and to the craft of storytelling.
And which Jonathas — on Twitter — pointed out after having time, three days, actually, to think about all that had happened. On Wednesday, she posted:
She was not the only one to note the tension. Also Wednesday, Ce’Aira Brown, a U.S. 2019 world championships finalist in the women’s 800, had this to say:
It’s not just that track and field, like swimming. is in the midst of a generational change. Which it is. And Jonathas, at 23, is one of the bright young, and already proven, talents on the U.S. team.
It’s this:
For today’s 20-somethings, it’s all about being authentic. Within the bounds of respect and decency, why not speak up? Ask Sha’Carri Richardson, 21, the women’s 100 champion.
And it’s not as if Jonathas is some nobody. Is she Felix, track royalty, with medals galore after a distinguished career at four Games? Of course not. But Jonathas anchored the U.S. women’s 4x4 relay to gold at the 2019 Doha world championship, and in the open 400 finished fourth, 13-hundredths out of the medals, the top American finisher. She is the 2019 NCAA Division I women’s 400 winner.
Phyllis Francis, Sydney McLaughlin, Dalilah Muhammad and Wadeline Jonathas after winning the women’s 4x4 relay at the 2019 world championships, Jonathas anchoring // Getty Images
She also was 2018-19 SEC First-Year Academic Honor Roll and, in May, graduated from the University of South Carolina with her bachelor’s degree in retail management. She intends one day to be the chief executive of a company — and why not?
“The issue,” Jonathas said in a telephone interview, “wasn’t the fact that I didn’t get interviews. It’s not about me. It’s about the finals,” meaning it’s a reasonable position to assert there were three people who qualified and thus three justly deserving of attention.
Referring specifically to the on-camera scenes after the 400, she said, “It didn’t become just about one person. It became about two people. They had kids. I was excluded. I’m not yet a mother. I’m very young. Thinking back on it, it felt like I didn’t accomplish anything because I wasn’t a mother.”
She also said, “I’ve never been one to care for attention. But when I feel I’m being excluded from things I earned, it makes me feel some kind of way — like I’m being disrespected. Like my hard work is not being noted.”
She added a moment later, “Even on social media I was hardly on [any posts]. It’s like you didn’t watch the Trials. It became more about that — about the kids,” meaning the toddlers, “rather than the athletes who worked so hard. Like putting in hundreds of hours, the stress we have to go through.”
And if there is anything for which Wadeline Jonathas ought to be respected, it’s hundreds of hours — an understatement — and hard work.
She was born in 1998 in Gonaives, Haiti. When she was 11, her mother, Mikerlange, managed to move the family to the United States.
“It’s hard being different from other people,” Jonathas says now, recalling those early days in school in Massachusetts. “It’s hard being from a different country or you have an accent or you don’t speak English the same way. You’re moving from school to school. I never had friends. I didn’t have a high school girl lifestyle. I was just trying to survive. I was just trying to be me.”
As she tells the story, they were in Malden, Massachusetts, when “things got harder.” So hard the family became homeless. Officials sent them — mom and, at that point, five children — to a shelter about an hour away, in Worcester.
There, in Worcester, after a while, they started anew. Wadeline’s escape was reading and, as it turned out, sports.
“My family doesn’t do sports,” she said. “They just focus on the regular part of life. When I started doing sports, my mother couldn’t understand it. She would say, ‘Why couldn’t you come home after school?’“
At first, it was basketball. Wadeline Jonathas had no idea what track was. The basketball and track teams would practice in the same high school gym. Turned out Wadeline could run up and down faster than everyone else and the track coach said, come run track.
She said, what is track?
He said, it’s just running.
She said, I don’t have shoes.
He said, wear your basketball shoes.
This, she said, was the end of her sophomore year of high school. She was 16.
Spikes? That same coach gave her a pair of his that he had used way back in the year 2000. They were too big for Wadeline. She had no other option. “I just laced them up really tight,” she said.
They got the job done. Until, going into the district meet her junior year, the shoes fell apart.
Wadeline started college at nearby UMass-Boston. There, in two years, she won nine individual Division III championships.
Mind you, she did this while working two jobs. One — for seven months — was after school and practice at a Blaze Pizza in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where the Harvard kids would routinely drop in. In a good week, she said, she might clear $200 making pizza.
Jonathas this February on her 23rd birthday // photo courtesy Wadeline Jonathas
Before her junior year, she transferred — as a scholarship athlete — to South Carolina. Finally, she said, “I never went a day without eating.”
As a junior, she won the NCAA outdoor 400, in 50.6 — the school’s first 400 champ since 2007. Indoors, South Carolina won the NCAA title, with Jonathas anchoring the 4x4 — after taking the baton in last place, passing runners from three other schools on the last lap.
Then came the world outdoors in Qatar. “It was amazing,” she said, adding when it was pointed out that she already is a world championship relay gold medalist, “I am. It’s not what I wanted. But it’s what I’ve got.”
Then, of course, came the pandemic. And a lot of waiting. And waiting some more.
Now the Trials. All three top finishers ran season’s-best times: Hayes 49.78, Felix 50.02, Jonathas 50.03.
Felix, bidding to run both the 200 and 400 in Tokyo, ran again Thursday, in the fifth of five heats. Predictably, and understandably, she was met by the faithful here at Hayward with a big roar. She has long called the 200 her “baby” — before, of course, being a real mom — and ran into Friday’s 16-athlete semifinals, in 22.56.
Hayes, also looking to double, moved into the semifinals, too, in 22.58.
“I do believe,” Wadeline Jonathas said, “the media loves who they love,” and thus by extension, fans, because fans know the stories that are on TV or in the newspapers or online. “You can’t make them love you. This is just too big of a task. It’s not something — you can’t make them pick you or not pick you.”
Jonathas is not running the 200. Only the 400.
“Everything,” she said, referring to her moment in the Trials 400, “was worked for,” adding, “If there’s one thing I know, it’s how to get where I need to get.
“I will,” she said, “do what I have to do to get where I have to go. And God knows I want to go places.”