By Mike Clark
Shamier Little headed to the Paris Olympics with one of the most impressive resumes ever for a track-and-field athlete from Illinois.
She’ll come home with a few more career highlights and some hardware.
The former 14-time state medalist and seven-time champ from Lindblom won a silver medal as part of the mixed 4×400-meter relay team on Aug. 3, a day after the team set the world record in the event.
Little, Bryce Deadmon, Kaylyn Brown and Vernon Norwood ran 3:07.41 in the prelims on Aug. 2 to break the world record.
“I always knew we were going to run fast,” Little told ESPN. “And we talked about it, it’s gonna take a record to get a medal. But it took a record to win a prelim. So I was just excited.”
The prelim race was the Olympic debut for Little, who was no stranger to elite competition. She won silver twice in her specialty, the 400 hurdles, at the World Championships in 2015 and 2023. She’s also a two-time NCAA champ in the event for Texas A&M in 2014 and ’15.
That followed a spectacular run at Lindblom, where she set Class 2A state-meet records that still stand in the 200 and 400. She also helped the Eagles finish third in 2A in 2012, the only state trophy won by a Lindblom girls team and only the second overall in school history.
In the world-record race, Little took the baton in third place after Norwood’s leadoff leg and gave Team USA a lead it never lost. Little told ESPN there nearly was a hiccup on the handoff from Norwood.
“I just thought I was locked in,” she said. “I had to realize I wasn’t where I was supposed to be. I just know I took a little momentum into it so I can get it back, and that was kind of the push I needed.”
Deadmon and Brown ran the third and fourth legs, respectively, en route to breaking the previous world record of 3:08.80 set by the U.S. at last year’s World Championships.
It took a brilliant anchor leg from the Netherlands’ Femke Bol to deny Team USA the gold the next day. Bol closed with a 47.93 400 to help the Dutch win the final in 3:07.43. Team USA took the silver in 3:07.74.
Little finished her stay at the Olympics by helping Team USA set an American record in helping the Women’s 4×400 relay team win the gold medal for the eighth consecutive Olympics. The relay team won the title by over four seconds, clocking a 3:15.30, breaking an American record that had stood since 1988’s Seoul Olympics. The relay’s time was also 0.1 seconds off of the world record set 36 years ago.
