Spartan Olympians: Sevatheda Fynes

SEVATHEDA FYNES, Member, Bahamas women’s track team, 1996 and 2000 Summer Games, Gold Medal, Sydney, 4x400-meter relay, 2000;  Silver Medal, Atlanta, 4x400-meter relay, 1996

            Sevatheda Fynes, ’98, arguably MSU’s finest female sprinter, won three NCAA titles and four Big Ten championships in 1997 and was named the George Alderton Female Athlete of the Year.

            She won two Olympic medals—a gold at the 2000 Sydney Games and a silver at the 1996 Atlanta Games—as a member of the Bahamas’ women 4x400 meter relay team.

            “We won the worlds in 1999 and they started calling us the ‘Golden Girls,’” recalls Fynes.  “After Sydney, they called us the ‘Golden Goddesses.’”

            In 2000 the Bahamian government minted a gold coin with the image of the team.  “Yes, I keep a coin,” says Fynes.  “I think it’s worth about $200.  They also minted a silver coin for us after 1996.”

            At MSU, Fynes won the NCAA 100-meter outdoors, 200-meter outdoors, and the 55-meter indoors.  An All American, she also ran the 4x100 and the 4x400 relays for MSU.  “When you’re young and in shape, you can do those things,” she notes. 

            From 2000 to 2006, Fynes lived and trained in Austin, TX, but a hamstring injury persisted.  “That’s why I fell off the face of the earth,” she says. 

            If the injury heals, she intends to try out for the Beijing Olympics. In early spring she was residing in Orange, NJ, tending to her eight-month-old baby, working out at the Seton Hall indoor track, and also helping to coach both women and men sprinters at Columbia University.