PARIS – There are places that are out there in the Pacific Ocean, and then there is Tuvalu, which is halfway between Hawaii and Australia, a collection of three reef islands and six atolls. All in, maybe 11,000 or so people call Tuvalu home. That makes it the second-least populous country on Planet Earth, behind Vatican City, and the least populous country where English is an official language.
If you put the reefs and the atolls together, you have a land mass of 10 square miles. For comparison, San Francisco is, rounding off here, 47 square miles.
Tuvalu sent two athletes to these Paris Games, both in track and field, and when one of them, 20-year-old Temalini Manatoa, settled into the blocks Friday morning in her heat of the women’s 100 meters, she was shaking from adrenaline and excitement and, if we are being honest, fear. She was scared. She said so. It’s big out there on that track for a young woman from a very small place.
“I’m doing my best,” she said afterward, finishing in 14.04 seconds, a personal best.
The big stage on the big day, Day One at the track at the Stade de France // World Athletics
The show here Friday morning, the first four rounds of the 100, is always one of the most compelling bits of theater at any Olympics. At these Paris Games, the prelims also featured a weird bit of kabuki theater involving a well-known marathoner from the Solomon Islands who inexplicably dropped into the 100.
It’s not a stretch to imagine this as the Olympics as a short play unto itself, four heats, hopes and dreams on the big stage, the purple track of the Stade de France, from start to finish not even a half hour, only a few moving on from these prelims to the qualifying rounds that would start here later Friday – in which the American Sha’Carri Richardson, easing up, would go 10.94, Jamaica’s Shelly-Ann Fraser-Pryce, the 2008 and 2012 100 champ, 10.92.
The world record in the women’s 100 is 10.49, which Florence Griffith-Joyner set way back in 1988.
Temalini Manatoa of Tuvalu after racing Friday
Jamaica’s Elaine Thompson-Herah, who is not running in Paris, set the Olympic record, 10.61, at the Tokyo Games.
The prelims are not so much about anything near 10 or even the low-ish 11 seconds.
Rather, they’re about – as the 1979 movie put it – being there.
Seemingly every bit of the human experience plays itself out. The highs. And the not so.
What human beings are – in many different ways – capable of.
Heat one:
Five of the eight finishers went 12 seconds or slower, Lucia Morris of South Sudan tumbling to the track with an apparent hamstring injury.
Ahamdy Salam Bouha of Mauritania, 23, finished last, in 13.71, a personal best.
“I’m not satisfied,” she said, in French. “I have to work more. It’s not my best performance. I will work and do my best.”
Faiqa Riaz of Pakistan
Heat two:
Six of nine 12 or slower. It would be seven but Bo-Ya Zhang of Chinese Taipei went 11.99.
Faiqa Riaz of Pakistan, who is 25, ran in a hijab and leggings. This marked her first international meet. She went 12.49.
“I like it,” she said of the hijab, stressing that no one was making her wear it – it was a personal choice.
“I was so excited. I was so nervous.”
She added, posing for a picture with her spikes, golden on the bottom, “I can do this!”
Same heat, sporting a Lululemon headband, representing Guam, Regine Tugade-Watson, 26, a 2020 graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy who in 2022 earned an MBA from LSU. Now a two-time Olympian, she was on active duty before the 2020 Games and prepared for Tokyo by running sprints on a U.S. Navy ship’s flight deck.
Regine Tugade-Watson of Guam
The records will show 12.02 next to her name for Paris. “To be able to represent,” she said about why she keeps at it, adding, “Guam is such a small island,” she said, “but all the love and support I have makes me feel more like a big country.”
Heat three:
Kimia Yousofi, 28, born in Iran, now resident of Australia after having fled the Taliban, representing Afghanistan for the third time at the Olympics, ninth of nine, 13.42.
“I just want to represent Afghanistan. This is our flag, our culture,” she said. “Our girls in Afghanistan, our women, they want basic rights.”
Finally, heat four:
In Lane Three, the curiosity and, inevitably, the controversy – 30-year-old Sharon Firisua of the Solomons, who ran the 5,000 meters in Rio in 2016, finishing 15th in a heat of 16, and the marathon in Tokyo, ending up second-to-last, 72nd of 73.
To the best of anyone’s knowledge, Firisua had never run a competitive 100. The form sheets showed no 100 time next to her name.
Australian press reports had indicated the Solomons’ national Olympic committee had decided, for reasons unknown, not to give their available 100 spot to the country’s best sprinter, Jovita Arunia.
She said she was thinking of quitting the sport altogether, telling Australia’s ABC News, “We’re the [actual sprinters] … I don’t know what went wrong. It’s unbelievable.”
From the ABC story: “Insiders suggest Firisua, now a three-time Olympian, was handed the spot by administrators as a ‘farewell gift’ as she exits professional competition.”
If you tried to make this stuff up, you probably could not.
When the gun went off, predictably, Firisua staggered out of the blocks. Her reaction time was a molasses-like 0.248 of a second. Immediately, she was so far behind she was literally out of the television picture, Katie Ledecky against everyone else-style.
She finished in 14.31.
The timing system helpfully noted this was a personal best.
This was, of course, because she had no other 100s against which to compare. So, of course, it was a “best.”
Firisua declined to speak afterward with reporters. On the orders, it was said, of the Solomon Islands national Olympic committee.
Temalini Manatoa, meantime, had run her race in Lane 4, the next lane over. She took time afterward to thank her parents and her coach.
Again and again, she said, cutting to the core, perhaps, of the Olympic Games, the ideal that stirs the dream in the flawed and imperfect world that all of us human beings race to make come alive before our eyes, “I do my best.”