The Fastest Woman

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.