Even as unforgiving heavy rain and unseasonably cool temperatures tested every athlete competing at Austin’s Mike A. Myers Stadium Friday, Saint Lucia’s sprint superstar Julien Alfred delivered a performance for the record books at the 2025 Texas Invitational. Crossing the finish line with a winning 10.93-second time in the women’s 100m, Alfred not only claimed gold but also notched the fifth-fastest 100m time recorded globally this season, backing up her world-leading 200m result from just one day prior.
Nearly six weeks out from her 25th birthday, the 2024 Paris Olympic 100m champion hit a new career milestone with this opening race of her 2025 season. Her 10.93-second clocking marks the joint-second-fastest season opener of her professional career, and the fastest 100m season-opening result she has ever posted in the month of April. Context bears out the impressiveness of the feat: while Alfred ran an even faster 10.89-second 100m to open her 2024 season, that race took place in June, two months later in the calendar year. In 2023, her fastest April 100m time was 10.95 seconds, two hundredths of a second slower than Friday’s result, and her 2023 season opener in May also hit exactly 10.93 seconds.
Running as a sponsored PUMA athlete, Alfred dominated a field stacked with top collegiate runners, with a +1.8 m/s trailing wind that fell well within official competition limits. She was joined on the start line by two fellow Caribbean athletes competing for event host Texas Longhorns: Jamaica’s Carleta Bernard took second place with an 11.34-second run, while University of Texas freshman and fellow Saint Lucian Naomi London crossed the line in fourth with a time of 11.45 seconds.
What makes Alfred’s result even more remarkable is the extreme poor weather that hampered competitors throughout the meet. Temperatures at the Austin venue dropped as low as 15 degrees Celsius (59 degrees Fahrenheit), with persistent rainfall and stiff crosswinds adding extra challenges to every sprinter’s performance.
This 2025 season marks the first year without a major global track and field championship on Alfred’s schedule since she turned professional in 2023. Looking ahead, multiple insider reports indicate the sprint star has her sights set on the 2026 Commonwealth Games in Glasgow, Scotland, as her primary target for the upcoming competition cycle. Alfred already claimed 100m silver at the 2022 Birmingham Commonwealth Games, finishing just behind Jamaican legend Elaine Thompson-Herah. With Thompson-Herah currently working her way back to top form after a period of injury, Alfred’s blistering early-season form sets the stage for a highly anticipated rematch between the two sprinters in Glasgow next July.