One, two, three, four. Sha’Carri Richardson, the American track star, counts up to ten. Her coach, Dennis Mitchell, does the same. We follow along on a clock on the track and see it’s perfectly in synch—that they have made the general unit theirs. At only twenty-one years old, Richardson is one of the fastest women ever across a hundred metres, a discipline Mitchell calls “one of the most expressive things that an individual can do.” Richardson prepares for months, for years, in order to measure her outward expression in the time it takes the water in your faucet to turn hot.
The film “Sub Eleven Seconds” follows Richardson in the run-up to the U.S. Olympic trials last year. Directed by the twenty-eight-year-old British filmmaker and photographer Bafic, and produced by the late fashion designer Virgil Abloh, who died in November, it focusses less on Richardson’s athletic preparation than on her attempts to make sense of time and all it can hold: victory, glory, reflection, grief, hope. “The thing that drew me to this is that Richardson’s medium, her core thing, is time,” Bafic told me of the project, the latest in a series of collaborations with Abloh and his studio, Architecture Films. A relationship with it is universal: “We have our measurement for recording time on the planet,” Bafic said, and also more precise increments, whether on the track or in film, where a second is marked by twenty-five frames. “And seconds is what makes up a minute, makes up an hour, makes up a day.” Makes up a life. “Everything happens when it’s literally meant to happen,” Richardson says in the film. “Everything happens at a certain time.”
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Richardson qualifying for her first-ever Olympics happened on the evening of June 19, 2021, at Hayward Field in Eugene, Oregon—one of the most famous tracks in the world, in a town nicknamed Track Town, U.S.A. As the summer sun began to set, she got down into the blocks. “The gun is going off. The people are in the stands. I’m on the track,” she says in the film, over and over, like a mantra, bracing herself to occupy that space in which time can be captured, however briefly. “Go.”
One, two, three, four. All the way to 10.86, running into a headwind. As she crosses the finish line, a whole stride ahead of the next competitor, she waves her lifted head, sticks out her tongue. She’s the top women’s sprinter out of the U.S., and the country’s greatest Olympic hope for the hundred-metre dash in two decades. In 2019, she set the women’s collegiate record (10.75) as a first-year at Louisiana State. In the two years in between, she routinely ran world-competitive times, including, in April, 2021, a 10.72, the sixth-fastest hundred-metre sprint by a woman ever.
“Everything happens at a certain time.” Richardson was disqualified for her first-ever Olympics on July 1, 2021. After her final race in Eugene, she ran up the stairs of the stands to embrace her grandmother, who raised her. Once back on the track, she mentioned in an interview that her biological mother had died unexpectedly the week prior. In a post-race drug test, Richardson tested positive for marijuana, not exactly a performance-enhancing drug. She accepted the United States Anti-Doping Agency’s minimum marijuana-related suspension of a month, keeping her from the Tokyo Games. Later, Richardson said that she had smoked—in Oregon, where marijuana use is legal—the night she learned of her mother’s death, which sent her into “a state of emotional panic.”
In the film, Mitchell says, of Richardson, “Everything she’s been through, everything that has happened to her in her life, whether it has been good or bad, all comes out in that ten-second period.” Time counts forward on the track, counts backward somewhere else. As Richardson gets down into the blocks, its directions merge, and, for a few moments, it stands still.
