# The Fastest Woman *A Biography of Flo Jo* — Legendary Biographies No. 010 - **Subject:** Florence Delorez Griffith Joyner - **Written by:** Roland Mercer - **Shelf:** Sport / Track & Field - **Published:** 2026 - **Extent:** 195 pages, 6 × 9 in, 60# uncoated cream, black ink - **Paperback:** $19.99 — 6 × 9 in · 195 pp · 60# uncoated cream, black ink · perfect-bound paperback - **EPUB:** $3.99 — EPUB 3 · DRM-free · reads on Kindle, Kobo and Apple Books (ISBN 979-8-90623-051-5) - **Audiobook:** $5.99 — Unabridged · measured from the masters · read by Gideon Marsh (ISBN 979-8-90623-197-0) Buy it, or read the opening free: volumes/010-the-fastest-woman.html ## About this book September 24, 1988, the Seoul Olympic Stadium. Florence Delorez Griffith Joyner, twenty-eight, wins the 100-metre final in 10.54 seconds. She wins the 200-metre final five days later in 21.34. Both records still stand. She also wins the 4x100 relay gold and a 4x400 relay silver. She is the first American woman to win four track-and-field medals at a single Olympics. Ten years later, on September 21, 1998, she is found dead in her Mission Viejo, California, bed of a seizure caused by a congenital cavernous angioma in her brain. She is thirty-eight. Roland Mercer's biography opens earlier — in the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles, where Florence was born in 1959, the seventh of eleven children — and follows the arc through the Jordan High School track team, the UCLA scholarship, the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics silver behind Valerie Brisco-Hooks, the 1987 marriage to Al Joyner and the name change to Griffith Joyner, the long-fingernail, one-leg-bare track-suit aesthetic, the Seoul triple, the Florence Griffith Joyner Brand fragrance and book, the post-track designing of NBA team uniforms, the long doping rumours she categorically denied, and the morning of September 21, 1998. What emerges is a portrait of the fastest woman ever to run, the longest-standing track-and-field record-holder in modern Olympic history, and the seizure the country didn't see coming. ## Contents 1. The Projects 2. Jordan High 3. Bob Kersee 4. Los Angeles 1984 5. The Transformation 6. Indianapolis 7. The One-Legged Suit 8. Seoul, The 100 Meters 9. Seoul, The 200 Meters 10. Seoul, The Relay and the Glory 11. The Fastest Woman Alive 12. Retirement 13. The Doping Question 14. Life After the Track 15. September 21, 1998 16. The Unbroken Records 17. Legacy 18. 10.49 ## Questions **Who is The Fastest Woman about?** Florence Delorez Griffith Joyner. The title never carries the subject's name: it names one concrete thing out of the life — in this case The Fastest Woman — and the name goes on the line underneath. **Is this an authorised biography?** No. No subject, estate, label or foundation had approval over the text, and none paid for a word of it. The cost of that independence is that no new interviews were conducted for the book; it is built from the public record, and it says on the page where a scene is reconstructed rather than documented. **Can I read some of it before buying?** Yes — the whole opening chapter and the writer's foreword, free and in full, with no email address and no account. That is 4,863 words of the book. **How long is it?** About 60,000 words, 18 chapters, 195 pages in the paperback. **What is the printed book like?** 6 × 9 in, 60# uncoated cream, black ink, perfect-bound paperback, matte laminate. Every title in the series uses the same specification, so they line up on a shelf. ## The writer Roland Mercer is a Boston-based culture writer whose biographies of athletes have appeared as cover features in Sports Illustrated and The Atlantic. He covers the NFL, NBA, and the institutions that profit from each. His longform writing focuses on the physical costs of modern athletic competition and the complex systems that surround professional sports. Through books like The Fastest Woman, Friendly Fire, and The Bypass Transfusion, Mercer examines the intersection of physical endurance and commercial pressure. In books such as The Twisties and The Industrial Park Murder, he explores the psychological strain on high-profile competitors and the darker aspects of competitive industries. He lives in Boston, Massachusetts, where he spends his free time rowing on the Charles River and collecting vintage sports memorabilia.