Julien Alfred was 14 when she left St. Lucia, alone, with dreams of chasing Olympic gold. She finally realized her dream in Paris, producing a stunning victory in the process. But winning Olympic gold has a way of reshuffling priorities. Now, for Alfred, the dream she spent a decade running toward has brought her back home.

“I try to go back at least once a month now,” Alfred said in an interview during Wanda Diamond League. “I’m very homesick, so I mean, after World Indoors, I had a conversation with Coach Flo just going back home and being with family as much as possible because, I mean, now I’ve been away for such a long time.

“Since I was 14, I left St. Lucia to be on my own and chasing my dreams. So I think that now I’m trying to go back as much as possible to just be with family.”

Her social media shows she visited St. Lucia in January 2026, alongside frequent trips in 2024 and 2025. Alfred even bought an apartment in 2024, in Saint Lucia’s prestigious Cap Estate.

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Moving to Jamaica in 2015 meant studying at St. Catherine High School, the perfect base for someone idolizing Usain Bolt and Elaine Thompson-Herah.

“On the day my mum left me, I cried so much,” she said in 2024. “I was without my family and friends and was thinking I should go back. I stayed with a family, but it was hard to adapt to a new culture. I didn’t understand the lingo, and I couldn’t go home for Christmas because we had December camps. I wanted to give up, but kept pushing because I knew something good would come out of it.”

But she stayed focused and flourished, becoming a Caribbean U15 champion in 2015. She then earned a scholarship to study in Texas in 2017. It meant another move for the teenager, but she took it, and once again, it worked in her favor.

By the time Julien Alfred had retired as a collegiate athlete, she was one of the most formidable short-distance runners around. She won the 100m and 4x100m in 2022 at the NCAA outdoors, and later, the 60m and 200m indoor. Not only that, but Alfred also won gold at the 2017 Commonwealth Youth Games, silver at the 2018 Youth Olympics, and more.

As if that wasn’t enough, she also broke numerous NCAA and collegiate records along the way. And she missed out on breaking Irina Privalova’s 60m world record by two hundredths of a second.

However, she claimed the North American record and set the second-fastest collegiate and world time for the 200m at the time. Yet, visits home remained rare during her collegiate years. The chance to make the most of her sprinting talent was something that Alfred couldn’t ignore.

“The sacrifice to leave my family at a tender age, the age of 14, to just chase my dreams, it was definitely a tough decision for me,” Alfred told Olympics.com in 2024.

It’s one of the biggest hurdles she’s had to face in her career so far. That and losing her father in 2013, with the latter forcing her to take a break from athletics. A coach eventually helped her through her grief, which led to the move to Jamaica two years later. It all paved the way for her eventual Olympic gold, which turned her into a hero for Saint Lucians.

Julien Alfred opens up on her hero’s welcome after Paris gold

Few expected Julien Alfred to win an Olympic gold. That was despite her victories prior to the Games.

The now 24-year-old proceeded to finish second at the Prefontaine Classic, then ran a lifetime best of 10.78 seconds in the 100m back in Jamaica. She then won the 100m in the Monaco Diamond League and set a national 200m record in the London DL. It set the stage for Paris, where Alfred absolutely dominated.

She set a new national record in the 100m with her gold medal run. More importantly, it marked Saint Lucia’s first-ever Olympic medal and turned Julien Alfred into something akin to a hero. And that’s exactly the way her country treated her when she made her return in September, after the Olympics.

“It was very overwhelming,” Alfred told Olympics.com in 2024. “I felt loved and supported by my fellow Saint Lucians. Definitely not what I expected, in the way that the love they poured into me. But overall it was really exciting — an amazing four days back on home soil, and I really enjoyed the celebrations.”

The government declared 27 September 2024 as “Julien Alfred Day,” and she even had the Millennium Highway renamed after her. Years after leaving Saint Lucia behind to chase a dream, she is spending more time than ever reconnecting with the place now that she has achieved her dream.