ODA’s Saraiah Walkes wins three gold at 1A state track meet

In the summer of 2020, Saraiah Walkes will be 17. She’ll have finished her junior year of high school with her sprinting times getting fast enough that she could start threatening to win some state championships if she were racing against boys. And, if everything goes according to plan, she also hopes she’ll spend about a month that summer in Japan for the 2020 Summer Olympics.

“I never stop thinking about that,” Walkes said.

But first, the Out-of-Door Academy eighth-grader needs to decide her plans for next weekend. Right now, she’s registered to be back at IMG Academy Field for the Florida middle school track and field state championships.

“I have to talk to her father,” head coach Jeff Taylor said with a laugh, “and see if she wants to bypass that.”

These are the dual realities Walkes finds herself in now. At Saturday’s Class 1A championships, the Out-of-Door eighth-grader was one of the most impressive performers. Walkes was entered three events and left IMG Academy with three gold medals. She ran the 100-meter dash in 12.28 seconds, the 200 in 24.89 and the 400 in 56.63. Her state championships are the first three in program history, and the 30 points she scored were enough to single-handedly give her team a sixth-place finish —Gainesville Oak Hall won with 75

Walkes will not officially start high school for another few months. Already, though, she’s achieved more than even some of the best athletes will during four years on the track.

“You can see the determination in her,” Taylor said. “Second place is just not in her vocabulary.”

It seldom has been since she finished second in the 100 at the Class 1A championships as a seventh-grader a year ago. She hasn’t finished second in the 100 since April 6 and hasn’t finished second in the 200 since March 9. She didn’t lose in the 400 this year.

She doesn’t really think of herself as being significantly younger than some of her competition anymore, even though she sometimes squares off against sprinters as much as five years her senior. That alone is progress from last year, when she finished second in the 100 despite beating herself up about the difficulty of the task ahead of her.

“I really was, like, doubting myself,” Walkes said. “I would be like, ‘Saraiah, you can’t do this. You’re going to get burned.’ I was dissing myself.”

This year, her strengths became the 200 and 400. They were always going to be part of her postseason plan; she finished worse than first once in the two events combined. As the Class 1A-District 7 meet approached in April she began studying other times across Class 1A with her coaches. Even though she had yet to win a 100 race in 2017, the time checks revealed she had just as good a chance as winning a state title in that event as in her two more established races.

Her performances through the postseason were dominant. She entered Friday’s preliminaries as the top seed in all three of her races based on her times at the Class 1A-Region 2 championships — all of which were school records.

By the end of the weekend, the crowd was used to her, but she drew audible gasps each time she separated from the pack down the stretch during preliminaries and left the audience murmuring about this impossibly quick 14-year-old.

“Wow,” Taylor remembers telling her at the end of the day. “You’re making this look easy.”

She answered with two words, he recalls.

“It was.”

This story was originally published May 6, 2017 at 3:00 PM with the headline "ODA’s Saraiah Walkes wins three gold at 1A state track meet."