AUSTIN, Texas — There was a moment on a recent random Wednesday, as the world champion sprinter and Olympic medalist Gabrielle Thomas juggled emails about a meeting she had to run at a volunteer health clinic and readied for a voiceover for a commercial with a blue-chip sponsor and figured out the logistics of an upcoming weight-training session, when she had something of an epiphany.
“I really did not perceive my life being the way it is now,” she said, looking up from her phone as she sipped a coffee at a cafe.
She’s not kidding.
Pretty much everything Thomas has accomplished in track, the two Olympic medals in Tokyo in 2021, the silver medal in the 200 meters and the gold medal in the 4×100-meter relay at the world championships last year in Budapest, is a little bit of a blur.
She has an undergraduate degree in neurobiology from Harvard, where she also studied global health and policy, plus a master’s degree in public health and epidemiology from the University of Texas. The running stuff was supposed to be long over by now. Halfway through college, she didn’t even know professional running was a thing. She thought her heroes, women like Allyson Felix and Sanya Richards-Ross, sort of disappeared for three years between Olympic Games.
Plus, she always had the voice of her mother, Jennifer Randall, running through her head. Randall is an endowed professor of education at the University of Michigan who specializes in racial bias in assessments. Athletics isn’t exactly the most important thing for her. Thomas’ call to her mother after she won those medals at the Tokyo Olympics went something like this.
Mom, I won two medals.
That’s great, honey, when do classes start?
A few months later, Thomas had to have what qualifies as a difficult conversation with her mom, telling her that she didn’t think she would pursue a Ph.D.
“I haven’t let that go,” Randall said during a recent conversation. “I am going to be quiet about it now because she has stuff to do, and I see the value of working before you get a Ph.D., so in my head, she is just getting work experience. She has time to come to her senses.”
Welcome to Gabby Thomas’ world.
Gabby Thomas celebrates her bronze medal in the 200 meters at the Tokyo Olympics, one of two medals she won there. She also took silver as part of the U.S. 4X100-meter relay team. (Philip Fong / AFP via Getty Images)