Last Oct. 12, Melissa Jefferson-Wooden boarded a float, wearing her Olympic 100m bronze medal and 4x100m relay gold medal, for a parade down Front Street.
So often growing up, she gathered there for festivities in Georgetown, a South Carolina seaport between Myrtle Beach and Charleston. Sometimes she took part as a tenor saxophone player with the Carvers Bay High School band.
But on this day, Jefferson-Wooden was the solo star, her stage coming at the end of a 200-plus-vehicle procession on a day named after her.
Once it was all over, she returned to Central Florida, where she now lives and trains, and the tasks at hand: planning her wedding and plotting how to become the world’s fastest woman.
Jefferson-Wooden, 24, placed her 2024 Olympic medals in a box under her TV and closed it. The focus shifted to the future — on the hardware to come at the 2025 World Championships in Tokyo.
She began working with a chef. Jefferson-Wooden was so serious that she avoided her beloved Culver’s deluxe ButterBurger with no onions and tomatoes.
Then Jefferson-Wooden, a habitual goal-setter (easy, medium and hard for each season over the years), wrote down some times. In 2025, she aimed to improve on her personal bests of 10.80 seconds in the 100m and 22.46 in the 200m.
The goal times she wrote were 10.6 for the 100m — “It was like 10.68,” she specified (a time that would have won 2024 Olympic gold) — and 21.9 in the 200m (a time that would have won 2024 Olympic silver).
Jefferson-Wooden already met both goals this year. She owns the world’s three fastest 100m times of 2025 (10.65, 10.66 and 10.73) and the second-fastest in the 200m (21.84).
Something more she wants to accomplish at worlds that start Saturday: become the second woman in the last 30 years to sweep the 100m and 200m at a World Championships after Jamaican icon Shelly-Ann Fraser-Pryce in 2013.
“I’ve been dreaming of days like this, and it’s finally starting to come true,” Jefferson-Wooden said after winning the U.S. 100m title on Aug. 1 in 10.65, becoming the joint-fifth-fastest woman in history. “Right now, the sky’s the limit.”
Those expectations did not always accompany her.
Jefferson-Wooden, the daughter of two preachers, had major surgery at five weeks old because formula curdled in her stomach, causing her to throw it back up.
“The last person that had this surgery was in the hospital for three months, and they went home with a colostomy bag,” mom Johanna said. “Melissa was in the hospital for two weeks and went home with nothing. It was like, oh God, we thank you.”
Jefferson-Wooden started sprinting young — at age 5, dashing around the home to find the remote control at bewildering speeds.
As a high school freshman, she won South Carolina state titles in the 100m, 200m and 4x100m relay in the 1A classification for the smallest schools by student population. She was the type of athlete who made friends with competitors from other teams.
When she was a high school junior, her father, Melvin, began feeling weak and lacking energy. He was diagnosed with myelodysplastic syndrome, a blood disorder than can lead to leukemia if not treated properly.
He underwent chemotherapy and was placed on a donor’s list for a bone marrow transplant. No matches were found.
So they tested family members. The preferred candidate turned out to be Melissa, the Jeffersons’ youngest of six children.
“She’s like, OK, it’s my time to step up to the plate,” Melvin said. “And I was like, wow. So it did something to me, and for me, to know that she doesn’t even think about whatever it takes when it comes to having to do something in order to save someone, much less her dad.”
Come the September 2018 transplant, Jefferson-Wooden was not producing enough stem cells. So Aunt Carrie Winns gave her an injection at 11 o’clock at night at a children’s hospital. Jefferson-Wooden cried, not for her own physical pain but because she so badly wanted her dad’s treatment to be successful.
“I remember me trying to console her and to let her know that everything was going to work out fine,” Winns said. “I guess she believed in that, because eventually she went off to sleep.”
The transplant was successful.
Jefferson-Wooden went back to Georgetown to finish her senior year of high school. The homecoming queen had two partial scholarship offers: to Coastal Carolina University in nearby Charleston and to Winthrop University near the Carolinas border.
Winthrop was her dream school, but Coastal just felt right after a campus visit. In her first race for the Chanticleers, she didn’t hear the gun and finished last in an indoor 60m.
Coach Karl Goodman was already considering converting her to the 400m. They made a deal: if Jefferson ran the 60m in 7.5 seconds at the next meet, she wouldn’t have to race the longer distance. Jefferson ran 7.55 and won.
Jefferson-Wooden stopped by Goodman’s office regularly seeking advice. They focused on improving her mechanics. Goodman jokingly said she came to Coastal with the form of “a little road runner.”
“If you saw someone running on the street, that’s how she looked,” he said. “It was a real project.”
As a junior, Jefferson-Wooden went into the 2022 NCAA Indoor Championships as the 12th seed in the 60m. She won it over a field of women from LSU, Florida, Oregon, Kentucky and Texas, including future Olympic 100m gold medalist Julien Alfred.
Jefferson-Wooden then placed eighth in the 100m at the NCAA Outdoor Championships despite going into the meet with the second-best collegiate wind-legal time that season behind Alfred.
Thirteen days later on the same Hayward Field track, she won the 100m at the 2022 USA Track and Field Outdoor Championships.
“One (NCAAs) had to be sacrificed for the other (U.S. Championships),” Jefferson-Wooden said that night. “Had I done good at NCAAs, I might not be standing here right now.”
She turned professional. Jefferson-Wooden then placed eighth in the 100m in her World Championships debut, plus led off a victorious 4x100m relay.
Her progress halted in 2023. Jefferson-Wooden ran no personal bests, didn’t break 11 seconds in the 100m (after running 10.82 in 2022) and was fifth in the 100m at nationals.
She remembered what her mom told her growing up: delayed doesn’t mean denied, a phrase that has come to define her sprint career.
She moved in late 2023 from Coastal to a professional training group — Star Athletics outside Orlando, led by coach Dennis Mitchell with 100m world champion Sha’Carri Richardson.
Jefferson-Wooden was slowed in early 2024 by a stress fracture just above her ankle. Despite missing two months of training, she placed second to Richardson in the Olympic Trials 100m. Then she was a grateful third behind Alfred and Richardson at the Paris Games.
“I’ve been speaking this now for a year,” she said after receiving her medal. “Every single day, ‘I want to be an Olympic medalist.’ I said gold medalist, but I got bronze.”
Jefferson-Wooden later got her gold in the 4x100m.
The U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Committee also awards each medalist an additional Order of Ikkos medal. Athletes then give it to somebody who was instrumental in their success.
Jefferson-Wooden gave one to her husband, Rolan, a former Coastal Carolina defensive tackle and now a licensed massage therapist.
She surprised her parents, who had traveled to Paris, with the other one. It rests in the same Georgetown home where Jefferson-Wooden took her first fast steps.
“She honored the sacrifices that were made for her to accomplish just a part of who she is today,” Johanna said of the Ikkos medal. “I guess we understood the assignment and didn’t even realize that we were on assignment.”
