Florence Griffith Joyner

The Full Biography

Florence Griffith Joyner. Sprinter. The Los Angeles woman who still holds the records, still owns the nails and the one-legged suit, and still leaves a public argument the sport has never quite closed.

This is her story.

The image most people still carry is a sprinter in a flash of color, hair streaming, a 10.49 that looks like a typo. FloJo. What the still cannot show is Florence Delorez Griffith of the Jordan Downs projects in Watts, a woman who had already been an elite runner before the 1988 paint job, and a death in 1998 at thirty-eight that the rumor mill still tries to turn into a verdict the autopsy did not write.

She was born on December 21, 1959, in Los Angeles. Eleven children in the house. Robert and Florence Griffith. Jordan Downs, Watts. She ran because the projects had a track and because a large household teaches you to move. Cal State Northridge first, then UCLA under Bob Kersee after the Northridge program was cut. She was already theatrical in the blocks — nails, hair, a sense that a race could be a costume — and already serious in the weights. She was silver in the 200 meters at the Los Angeles Olympics in 1984, already decorated, already working jobs on the side because American track did not yet pay like a corporation. Valerie Brisco-Hooks was in the same frame. The country filed Griffith as a fashion footnote to a home Games. The clock had already filed her as elite.

She stepped away after 1984. She worked in a bank. She designed hair and nails. She married Al Joyner in 1987 — Olympic triple-jump gold from 1984, Jackie Joyner-Kersee’s brother. The name Griffith Joyner is a family as well as a brand. She came back for 1988 as a different weather system. Bob Kersee still coached the group. Al took a larger share of the day-to-day. The training was not a montage. It was a year of work that the paint would make people forget to mention.

Rome, 1987: the World Championships. She took silver in the 200 behind Silke Gladisch of East Germany. She was already a finalist on the biggest outdoor stage. She was not yet a climate. The winter and spring of 1988 are the year the stills skip — the weights, the starts, the work Al and Kersee argued over in the way families of gold argue. She arrived in Indianapolis as a woman who had already been silver in a home Olympics and silver at a Worlds. She left as a different weather system.

At the U.S. Olympic Trials in Indianapolis, on July 16, 1988, she ran the 100 meters in 10.49. A world record that still stands. The wind gauge read legal — 0.0 — a reading people still dispute as a stuck instrument. The IAAF kept the mark. The sport has had decades of faster shoes, faster tracks, and professional money. The 10.49 is still the number on the graphic. She also ran 10.61 and 10.70 in those Trials, times that would have been news in any other body. In Seoul she won the 100 in 10.54. She won the 200 in 21.34, another world record that still stands, run in the final, not in a disputed heat. She had already broken the 200 record in the semifinal. She took gold in the 4×100 relay. She took silver on the 4×400, a fourth medal in a week, running a relay that was not her first event. Three golds and a silver. The nails, the one-legged suits, the hair — the sport had not seen a woman treat speed as spectacle and still win by margins that made the spectacle irrelevant. She won the James E. Sullivan Award as the nation’s top amateur athlete. Associated Press Female Athlete of the Year. The year was a climate.

The times were so fast that the argument wrote itself. No failed drug test attaches to her name. She was tested. The lab file is empty of a positive that holds. The rumors said what rumors say about any woman who jumps a century in a year: steroids, something hidden, a body that could not be natural. A complete life says: the clock said what it said, the lab said what it said, the wind gauge said what it said, and the whisper has outlived the evidence. She retired in 1989, still young, twenty-nine, and did not give the circuit another decade to stare.

I don’t talk about the records. I ran them. They can do the talking.Florence Griffith Joyner

She designed. She made appearances. She had a daughter, Mary Ruth, in November 1990. President Bill Clinton named her co-chair of the President’s Council on Physical Fitness and Sports. She sat in that room as a woman who had already been the clock and was now asked to talk about children running. USA Track & Field put her in its Hall of Fame in 1995. She thought about Atlanta in 1996 and then a hamstring ended the thought. In 1996, on a commercial flight to St. Louis, she had a seizure. The plane diverted. A hospital. The public did not make a long story of it. The family already knew the body had a second file besides the clock. Friends from the 1984 room still describe a runner who worked bank hours and designed hair on the side because the sport did not yet pay. The 1988 paint made people forget the bank. The bank is in the file.

The 1984 silver in Los Angeles is easy to underfile because 1988 is so loud. She was already a finalist in a home Olympics, already in the frame with Valerie Brisco-Hooks, already a woman Kersee had trained at UCLA after Northridge lost its program. She finished second in the 200 to Brisco-Hooks. She was twenty-four. She was not a debutante in Seoul. She was a second-act peak, which is a different sentence. The nails and the one-legged suit were a choice she had already been making in smaller rooms. 1988 made the choice a climate. The clock made the climate irrelevant and also, somehow, the only thing the whisper wanted to talk about.

The turn is retirement and then the night in September 1998. She died in her sleep in Mission Viejo. She was thirty-eight. The Orange County coroner said suffocation during an epileptic seizure — positional asphyxia. The autopsy found a cavernous hemangioma, a congenital tangle of blood vessels in the brain, a condition she had been born with. No drugs. No alcohol. No hidden chemistry that would turn 1988 into a morality play. A review of the records of her death did not write the verdict the internet wanted. The family has had to live with both the grief and the comment section’s autopsy. That is a year she does not get to answer.

Al and their daughter, Mary, have kept a quieter house than the nails would predict. Friends from UCLA describe a runner who was already theatrical in the blocks and already serious in the weights. FloJo is a costume the records happen to justify. The costume is not the clock. The clock is still hers. Every Olympic summer puts both sentences back on the graphic.

The later years

There were not many, and that is the first honest sentence. She left the track in 1989 at the top of the clock. Design work, some commentary, a young daughter, a body that had already done the impossible thing. She did not become a long second act of farewell miles. She became a woman in Orange County who had already been the fastest woman in the recorded world and was now a mother who still painted her nails as if a final were tomorrow.

The Clinton appointment was a real job, not a ribbon. She talked about children and fitness the way a person talks about a kitchen she actually uses. She designed running wear and nails as a business, not a hobby the stills invented. The one-legged suit had been a race costume. The years after 1989 tried to make a shop of it. She appeared. She endorsed. She did not become a long farewell of exhibition miles. The Hall of Fame night in 1995 put her among the American names the sport keeps. She looked, in those photographs, like a woman who had already won the argument with the clock and was willing to sit for the civic version. The 1996 comeback thought was brief. The hamstring said no. The seizure on the airplane that same year — a flight to St. Louis, a collapse, a hospital — was the first public crack in the body the rumors had already been inventing reasons for. The family treated it as medicine. The columns treated it as atmosphere.

Mary Ruth Joyner was eight when the night in Mission Viejo came. Al has spent the years since as a widower, a father, and a public correction: the coroner said seizure, the lab said nothing, the internet said what the internet says. He has had to say it again every Olympic cycle, when 10.49 returns to the graphic and the whisper returns with it. Friends from the UCLA room still describe the worker first. The nails were a choice. The clock was a fact. The hemangioma had been there since birth. Those three sentences do not travel as well as a rumor. They are still the file.

On the night of September 21, 1998, she died in her sleep in Mission Viejo. Al found her. Mary was eight. The Orange County Sheriff-Coroner’s office did the work the internet would refuse to do. Dr. Richard Fukumoto’s office reported asphyxia during an epileptic seizure. The hemangioma had been there since birth. Toxicology was clean. That is the official file. It has not moved. What moved, and has never stopped moving, is the rumor: that 10.49 could not be clean, that a death at thirty-eight was a confession the lab had failed to extract in 1988. No coroner wrote that sentence. No positive test wrote that sentence. The sentence is a habit of a sport that still cannot believe a woman in a one-legged suit could also be the clock.

The years of the name after 1998 are every Olympic preview that still puts 10.49 on the graphic, and every whisper that still has no lab. Al has had to be a widower and a public correction at the same time. Mary has had to grow up as the daughter of a still. Friends from the UCLA room still describe the worker first and the nails second. She died before a long second act could be written. The second act of the records is still being written every summer, by women who run at her clock and have not caught it. Watts still claims the household. Seoul still claims the paint. The coroner claims the night. The rumor claims what rumors claim. Only one of those is a document.

USA Track & Field still lists both world records as hers. The 100 has been run in legal wind, in faster shoes, on faster tracks, for more than three decades. The 200 the same. Neither mark has moved. That arithmetic is why the rumor will not die and also why the rumor is idle: if the marks were a trick, the sport has had a generation to catch them. It has not. The Orange County file has not moved either. Seizure. Hemangioma. Clean toxicology. The two documents — the clock and the coroner — are the life. The comment section is not.

After she was gone

Every woman in the blocks still runs at her clock. Every fashion-in-track conversation still uses her as the first. Watts still claims the household. Seoul still claims the paint. The records claim the rest. The comment section claims a verdict it was never given.

She came out of Jordan Downs, took a silver, married into a family of gold, painted 1988 so brightly people forgot to watch the clock, retired, and died in her sleep at thirty-eight with the records still hers and the autopsy still empty of the story the rumors wanted. If you only remember the nails, you have the spectacle. If you remember 10.49, the empty lab, and Mission Viejo, you have her.

Portrait: White House Photographic Office · Public domain · via Wikimedia Commons

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