AUSTIN, Texas — On a recent Wednesday, world champion sprinter and Olympic medalist Gabrielle Thomas was busy fielding emails about a meeting she had to attend at a volunteer health clinic while preparing for a Ad voiceover with blue font. chip sponsor and figuring out the logistics of an upcoming weight training session, when she had an epiphany.
“I really didn’t realize what my life was like now,” she said, looking up from her phone while sipping coffee at a cafe.
She wasn’t kidding.
Almost all of Thomas’ achievements in track and field, including two medals at the 2021 Tokyo Olympics, a silver medal in the 200m and a gold medal in the 4×100m relay at last year’s world championships in Budapest, are a bit insignificant. of blur.
She holds a bachelor’s degree in neurobiology from Harvard University, where she studied global health and policy, and a master’s degree in public health and epidemiology from the University of Texas. The running thing should be over by now. Halfway through college, she didn’t even know professional running was a thing. She thinks her heroes, women like Allison Felix and Sonya Richards-Rose, disappear for three years between Olympics.
Plus, the voice of her mother, Jennifer Randall, is always in her head. Randall is a professor of education at the University of Michigan who specializes in racial bias in assessment. Track and field was not the most important thing to her. This is what Thomas called her mother after winning a medal at the Tokyo Olympics.
Mom, I won two medals.
Great, dear, when will the class start?
A few months later, Thomas had to have a difficult conversation with her mother, telling her that she didn’t think she would pursue a PhD.
“I’m not giving up on that,” Randle said in a recent conversation. “I’m going to keep quiet now because she has things to do and I see the value in working before getting a PhD, so in my mind she’s just getting work experience. She’s had time to sober up.”
Welcome to the world of Gabby Thomas.
Gabby Thomas celebrates her 200m bronze medal, one of two medals she won at the Tokyo Olympics. She also won a silver medal as a member of the U.S. 4X100m relay team. (Philip Fong/AFP via Getty Images)
During these months, many former and potential future Olympians focus on the task at hand, which is making the Olympic team and reaching the podium in Paris this summer. Anything else will feel like a distraction or distraction from the main goal, which in many cases has been the main focus of their lives since they were children.
Thomas has lived a rebellious life for most of his 27 years. Of course, she kicked off the 2024 season by winning the 100 and 200 meters at the Texas State Relays last weekend and setting a wind-assisted personal best in the 100 meters. But in her world, track and field and the other sports she competed in were (and in some ways still are) a distraction. After her sophomore year at Harvard, she almost quit running altogether.
She felt running was undermining her research into autism at Boston Children’s Hospital. She wanted to become a member of one of Harvard’s final clubs, and she became increasingly involved in Harvard’s Undergraduate Women in Business organization. Additionally, she is heading to Senegal to study abroad for the summer.
All of which seems more important than another series of intervals or weight training.
Her coach Keba Tolbert and her mother listened. Tolbert told her she was just having a “normal Harvard experience.” Many students struggle with grades at some point, especially those like her who are aspiring to college. She just needed some more sleep.
Her mother told her that she would agree with whatever decision her daughter made. She also knew that Thomas had always been one of the most competitive people on the planet. She and her twin brother Andrew, now a graphic designer in Idaho, were born by C-section and were removed first. Randall can still hear his daughter’s screams.
“She fought with all her might to be Twin A and ended up with the umbilical cord wrapped around her neck,” Randall said. “From then on, she had no interest in anything other than first place. She was in everything. They all compete with him.”
Randall knew how things were going to go. There was no way her daughter would give up. She just needed a break to recharge and find a way back to the things she loved and felt important.
She did it. how.
Gabby Thomas stretches during a recent workout in Austin, Texas, where she works up to 10 hours a week at a health clinic. (Matthew Futterman/ Competitor)
It was on the youth soccer fields in Georgia and Massachusetts, where she grew up, that Thomas first got the hint that she was faster than everyone else. Her team plays classic kick-and-run football—kick the ball through the defense and let your center run past everyone to track down the ball and score. Thomas’ father, Desmond, played football at Duke University and scored many goals.
In seventh grade, as a day student at Williston Northampton School, a private prep school in central Massachusetts, she began competing in track and field, as well as on the soccer and basketball teams. She specializes in the long jump and triple jump, which require speed to gain momentum for big jumps. She didn’t consider herself a top sprinter, although she won many high school races and became New England’s prep champion.
Once at Harvard, though, she quickly began rewriting school and Ivy League records, qualifying as a freshman for the 2016 U.S. Olympic Track and Field Trials. Coaches from track and field factories such as Oregon State came to Tolbert and said that if they knew she was so good, they would pay more attention to her.
What happened? Tolbert freely admits that Harvard is not known for producing world-class sprinters, but the university gave Thomas the opportunity to train with fast girls every day.
“You put a talented, competitive person on a national team and it makes her take off,” he said. “The team pushed her to become so good so quickly.”
At the 2016 Olympic Trials, she shared the track with heroes including Felix and finished sixth in the 200m. She remembers Torie Bowie, who won the race, beating her by 0.5 seconds, making up for the staggered start lead Thomas gave her in the first few steps.
“I was smoked,” Thomas said.
Then came the sophomore slump. As a freshman, she placed third in the national 200-meter meet, and as a sophomore, she placed third again. The academic challenges were increasing and she was overwhelmed. She just wanted to be a college student. She has been running for two years and has competed in the Olympic trials. She’s done.
Gabby Thomas celebrates winning the 200m final at the 2021 U.S. Olympic Track and Field Trials in June. Thomas nearly gave up on track and field after the last Olympic cycle. (Andy Lyons/Getty Images)
She then went to Senegal, where she spent six weeks learning about health care and culture and traveling throughout the West African country, meeting people struggling to gather the necessities needed to survive. She looks out to sea from the “Door of No Return” on Gorée Island, considered a key stop on the journey to the Americas for thousands of enslaved people. She decided she could manage her life, busy as it was, and whatever happened to her grades or results on the track, it wouldn’t matter that much.
That’s when she got real quickly. In March of her junior year, she became the first Ivy League female sprinter to win an indoor national championship, setting a new college record in the 200 meters. That’s when Tolbert sat her down and explained that being a professional runner was a real job where she could get shoe sponsors, win prize money, and spend the first part of her adult life Time to travel the world and compete in competitions.
Interesting, Thomas thought. who knows?
She spent the summer competing in Europe and signed with New Balance her senior year, forgoing her final year of college eligibility because that was before college athletes were allowed to make money through sponsorship deals. While other pros are preparing for the 2019 World Championships, she is completely a college student, especially around graduation. After graduation, she traveled to Barcelona with friends and then to the Oxford and Cambridge campuses on the quadrennial Harvard-Yale-Oxford-Cambridge track and field trip to Ireland with her track partners.
“Don’t want to miss this,” she said.
She knew she was supposed to compete in the national championships that summer, but she had no idea that if she made the team, there would be what was called the world championships next. She reached the 200m final at the National Games before tearing her hamstring.
Tonja Buford-Bailey, a leading sprint coach whose team Thomas would soon join, approached her after the race and told her she needed to get that leg back, and Learn how to run turns. Thomas added it to her to-do list.
Randall had a request for his daughter as she was considering which training team to join to start her career. It had to be near a university with a top public health program so she could begin her graduate work. Thomas wouldn’t have it any other way, which was the main reason she enrolled in Bailey, Texas.
In addition to transforming herself into a world-class sprinter and Olympic medalist, she has spent the past three years earning a graduate degree in epidemiology. Her master’s thesis was about racial disparities in sleep health and how it leads to further health challenges.
She said she believes people of color are more likely to work low-wage jobs and work hours that don’t align with circadian rhythms, which can lead to sleep problems that can lead to cardiovascular disease. When she conducted her study, she controlled for income levels, and the gap between people of color and white people remained. Over a lunch of sunny-side-up eggs and sourdough toast, she explained that she’d been talking to experts who had been looking for biological or evolutionary explanations, but had yet to come up with any.
She also started working at a local health clinic and now spends 10 hours a week supervising a team of volunteers managing the health of about 70 patients with high blood pressure. On a recent evening, she hosted one with several volunteers, Melissa DeHaan, the clinic’s registered nurse and case manager, and Dr. Mark Ambler, a family physician and longtime clinic volunteer A training session. She persuaded sponsor New Balance to donate running shoes to all the clinic’s patients. She asked volunteers to collect information about shoe sizes and send them to her.
Gabby Thomas during a meeting at the health clinic in Austin, Texas, where she works. “I really didn’t realize what my life was like now,” she said. (Matthew Futterman/ Competitor)
She said the things she did that night are why she’s still running. The more she campaigns and wins, the bigger her platform becomes and the more she becomes an advocate for improving access to health care and closing racial disparities.
“Hopefully after the Paris Olympics, I can give back more and create a bigger buzz, like there’s a foundation dedicated to this,” she said.
That’s the kind of talk Randall likes to hear.
She was the first person to tell Thomas how fast she was and that one day she could be an Olympian. Thomas was about 11 years old at the time.She rolled her eyes yes mom “Some way,” Randall said. But Randall always viewed running as a means to an end, to get an education that would lead to opportunity, and “to give back to the community that loved her before anyone knew how fast she ran.”
First, Thomas still has some games to play. Randall, never a track mom, is even considering changing her habit of watching from her living room and participating in person, especially if her daughter can make it to Paris.
Afterwards, maybe they could discuss the Doctor some more.
(Above: Dan Goldfarb / Competitor; Photo: Tim Clayton/Corbis via Getty Images)
