We saw a beautiful nine-year-old girl named Machelle Sweeting win the Colgate Women’s Games VI eight-hundred-metre run, at Madison Square Garden. She ran so fast and she ran so gracefully that at times she seemed to be not a little girl running in an arena but a young, long-limbed animal running on the veldt. The other day, we went up to Harlem and called on Machelle Sweeting. With her in her family’s living room were her mother, Mary; her father, Eddie; her sister, Elizabeth; her brother, Glenn; and her seventeen-year-old track coach, Kevin Moore. Machelle at first appeared shy, so her mother, a handsome and expansive woman, said, “Machelle has won around thirty races in the last year and a half. She has only been running for two years, and competing for less than that. I cannot believe it. She was born with a dislocated hip, and the doctors thought that she would never be able to walk at all. I discovered her dislocated hip when she was three months, and when I took her to the doctor they wanted
her to have an operation. I said no, she was too young. They designed a special brace for her, and she wore it until she was thirteen months. She started to run because her sister Elizabeth was running. I didn’t want her to run—I was always afraid she would do something to her leg. But Kevin, who was also Elizabeth’s coach, kept encouraging her. In a year and a half, she has won fifteen first-place trophies, one for third place, and one for fourth. She is part of a relay team that is No. 1 in the country for girls nine years and under. That one over there is my favorite of all her trophies—the East Coast Invitational. She broke the national record on her first day, and on the second day she broke her own record. She is a very bright girl. She has won a Kiwanis Science Award for an electricity project. She painted a shoebox blue, put a light bulb in the top, connected two wires to a battery and the light bulb, and made the box light up. She writes poetry and has won a special award from the World Poets’ Resource Center—it does a lot locally to promote student poetry. She is in the third grade, and is her class president and an honor student. For one of her class projects, she wrote a book called How the Zebra Got His Stripes. Her reading score is 6—9.”
By then, Machelle wasn’t feeling so shy.
We asked her what she liked to do besides running.
She said, “I like to sing television commercials and I like to mimic my mother.” She proceeded to sing a television commercial for the Broadway show Peter Pan and one for the Broadway show Evita, and she sang the song in the Trident sugarless-gum commercial and the song in the commercial
for Sasson jeans. Then she mimicked the voice of her mother, just home from her job at an Off-Track Betting office and tired, on the telephone with a friend. Then she said to us, “I like spinach, I like carrots, I like peas and rice, I like steak, I like celery, I like ice cream, I like chocolate, and I like to paint—especially with the color blue.”
—March 31, 1980