Gabby Thomas is faster than Marion Jones or Allyson Felix in the 200-meter dash. The “Black Girl Magic” poster girl is poised to become the first gold medal-winning Harvard alumna.

Gabby Thomas, the incredible sprinter, came in the U.S. More than just her baggage, she was ready for the Olympic Trials in late June. Relief that it was not cancer; confidence that she would triumph; motivation from an idol; a community to inspire; a sport to master; a stage to develop; and a world to transform. She also had a birthday present to get her mother.

That slate would be overwhelming to most people. Thomas is not like most people. Merely training for the Olympics wasn’t enough for her; she calls this type of overcrowded docket “Tuesday.” No, she needed to get in shape, relocate to Texas, start graduate school, sign up for a track club, hike, learn how to use an air fryer and volunteer. Once more, she was preparing for the Olympics and awaiting word from medical professionals regarding a malignancy in her hamstring.

She told her best friend, “If I’m healthy, I’m going to win,” even as she was taking a plane to Eugene, Oregon.

Thomas specialises in the 200-meter dash, which Florence Griffith Joyner used to dominate. Thomas recorded a personal best time of 21.98 seconds in her heat. She dropped that PR to 21.94 in her semifinal. She also ran the third-fastest time in the event’s history, 21.61, in the final, where an Olympic bid was on the line. Only twice had someone run faster than the legendary FloJo. Not Gwen Torrence, not Marion Jones, nor Allyson Felix—icons all. During a Zoom call, Thomas told reporters, “I’m still in shock.” “I can’t believe I stood there for that long.”

Ngozi Musa, her closest friend, observed from the grandstands of Hayward Field’s past. She was aware of every step Thomas had taken to get there, including the struggling single mother, the yearning for tight pants, giving up sports, starting Harvard without much fanfare, taking positions, and being accepted by the Black community. For Musa, merely observing this “beautiful” event is “the pinnacle of my year.”

The group had intended to celebrate afterwards, but they were forced to return to Thomas’s hotel room because of COVID-19 regulations. When actor Ashton Kutcher sent her a congratulations message over a direct message, they laughed. When the actress she had been crushing on for a long time, Gabrielle Union, texted them, they gasped. They even devised a scheme to tweet in reference to her favourite band, the Jonas Brothers.

June 26, that same year, was Dr. Jennifer Randall’s 47th birthday. Once they got along, mom told her daughter that while the history was interesting, she should also consider the present. “You were given your life by me, the lady!Randall made fun of her. Well, anything. All she would accept was the medal Thomas had won, which she intended to put in a cabinet at her home.

Thomas, her mother, and her closest friend were all wondering the same thing at that point: how she was going to take all that had transpired on the track and apply it to everything else. This was a circular attempt, because the best sprinter in America isn’t the only one who can multitask. Rather, her career, including several pursuits and interests, improved her as a sprinter, propelling her to the Olympics.

Musa explains, “We simply kept talking about representation and what was possible.” “I refer to it as black girl magic for Gabby.”

Thomas, the family outcast who started playing soccer, karate, softball, lacrosse, golf, and tennis, “was pretty much born athletic,” according to her mother. Even as a toddler, Thomas’s mother claims that it seemed as though “she was floating on air” when she scampered down a corridor.

Randall continues, “Superfast, even then.”

Nevertheless, Randall is not that parent—the kind that watches a kid stumble across a pitch and assumes they will achieve unattainable athletic success. She is realistic and practical and did not initially see Thomas as a potential professional athlete. Since her daughter’s biggest strength was her brains, Randall anticipated her becoming a doctor.

The mother of a future Olympian was an avid Olympic spectator, especially when it came to the sprinters—like the legendary FloJo, who stood for black women all over the world. While engrossed in watching television in 2008, Randall stumbled upon Felix, who won the silver medal in the 200 metres. Randall is aware that her next words could come across as irrational, but she turned to face her daughter at that precise moment and remarked, “You look like this person.” You run in this person’s manner. Thomas, who is only eleven, rolled her eyes and said, “You can go to the Olympics.”

Randall decided on a fresh approach, one that was used at the beginning of time. She would use coercion to get Thomas to buy her the brilliantly coloured, slim jeans she so badly desired. Mom hesitated, telling herself she would buy the item the next day—and then the one after that—but it felt bad, just a bit. Meanwhile, Thomas gave up, got back on course, and won her maiden race. Since then, she hasn’t stopped running. An Olympian, though? Randall remarks, “I don’t know if she ever thought that.”

Randall, a social studies teacher at a public high school and a single mother of twins, yearned for more for her children. She made the decision to follow her own example, starting with her own aspirations. She returned to school, completed her doctorate at Emory University, accepted a professorship at the University of Massachusetts, and relocated her family to New England.

Randall registered her daughter at the exclusive, affluent, and exclusive Williston Northampton School, where pupils have access to 27 advanced placement courses and can even sign up for the ski team. The institution’s formal name begins with a capital T. Randall, though, thought Thomas should learn more than just Latin. She also needed to know how to succeed in historically “white places,” not just how to navigate them.

Thomas had to miss a few important national track competitions due to her responsibilities. When she finally did start taking the sport seriously in her junior year, she was able to run faster due, in part, to her other pursuits. Recruiting pitches started to arrive in her mailbox. She even competed in national team races against Felix, her ideal athlete.

Thomas retained something about Felix—her poise and manner of bearing herself. After her mother, she had discovered her role model, a backup guide.

Randall laughs on the phone from Amherst. Not about the private school, not about Felix. She never actually purchased those tight jeans, you know. Was that birthday present that was left unopened as payback?

It was during a Harvard freshmen orientation that Thomas and Musa first connected and became future track team colleagues. With Thomas’s calm and controlled demeanour and Musa’s more “stormy” nature, they ended up being the ideal counterbalance to one another. They even took off in that direction. Thomas ran with an apparent lack of concern, always elegant, as though she could hold a textbook on her head. Musa made quick bursts of attack on the course.

They were tutored by Kebba Tolbert, who brought Thomas on board following a suggestion from a guidance counsellor at Williston. Thomas observed a runner who was raw, intelligent, and fiercely competitive—all desirable qualities for a coach looking to assemble a team of quick thinkers.

But when asked if he could have predicted all of this, Tolbert provides an open response. In a word, both yes and no. Even though he thought that Thomas could win an NCAA championship, he did inform her that she could. Regarding Thomas’s high school records, he remarks, “there are lots of kids that accomplish that.” If someone had asked him back then if he thought she would become one of the three fastest women in the world, he would have said, “That’s kind of a stretch.”

But there aren’t thousands of children just like Thomas. He was also aware of that. With the goal of becoming an epidemiologist, she studied in both global health and neuroscience. Thomas was interested by her research, particularly the Tuskegee experiment, in which nearly 400 Black men were misled by the US government into believing they were receiving free syphilis treatment while, in reality, the illness was being allowed to spread in order to study its consequences. In a freshman lecture titled “Sick and Tired of Being Sick and Tired: Health Disparities and African Americans,” she discovered this.

In those classrooms, another typically white domain, Thomas vented his rage by calling her mother. Randall shot back, saying, “You should be mad,” then threw down a challenge.Make use of it.

Thomas’s perspective was widened by that instruction, which included studies on how the media presented the crack academically and courses on health care inequalities. Her objective was to channel her rage. Tolbert remarks, “This individual is serious.”

Thomas was practically on the sidelines at first. Working with Tolbert on everything from technical proficiency to mental focus, Musa claims that Thomas was “always underestimated” due to a combination of factors including late and light recruitment, packed schedules, and missed meetings. The incubator was competitive, which helped Thomas because that was her ethos. Additionally, she had never trained all year round. then managed to rank third in the NCAA championships before the end of her rookie season, and then went on to place sixth at the Olympic trials.

Track would not define Thomas even in such a case. It never will, even if she becomes the world’s most famous person, wins the gold, and lands on a box of Wheaties. She thought about reducing her responsibilities and giving up the sport. Despite her mounting dissatisfaction, she placed third at the NCAAs her sophomore year once more. Her mother told Thomas that school was more important than sports, but she also described the accumulation of stress as overwhelming.

Her daughter started practicing meditation, made an effort to get more sleep, and even took sporadic breaks to paint her nails or soak in an Epsom salt bath. When that proved insufficient, she asked Tolbert if she might spend a semester studying in Senegal. She felt lighter there since she observed happy, connected people who didn’t have much money.

Returning with a fresh perspective, she saw that she could manage eight million pursuits and that, if she excelled at any one of them, she would excel at them all. If that seems contradictory, consider this: Thomas became the first NCAA sprint champion in Ivy League history by setting the indoor collegiate record in the 200 metres. After that, she continued to win, setting records for the university every other month and capturing 22 Ivy titles in six different events.

That’s when her gaze changed again. Nothing would stop her from adding to her plate, which now bore a resemblance to something a competitive eater might minimise during a contest. After telling her mother that she intended to pursue a career in running, they started to create a blueprint for that kind of life. Meanwhile, Randall never ceased instilling in her daughter the greater purpose of their endeavour. After that, what are you going to do? How are you going to support women of colour?”

Thomas completed her degree even though she became a pro. Fittingly, she signed with New Balance.

After relocating to Texas, Thomas added her own dreams to the list of things that are bigger there. As her mother researched how standardised exams affected historically excluded groups, her daughter decided to go from the lab to the policy realm, choosing to study public health at Texas during the breaks between the Games’ training sessions.

She also became a member of the Buford Bailey Track Club in an attempt to learn from and receive advice from black women who had competed for gold. This gave Thomas even more motivation to pursue her current goals, helping her to clarify how she wished to alter the world by addressing the health care disparities that the epidemic made brutally clear. Additionally, her accomplishments on the track enabled her to alter the world beyond her wildest dreams.

Thomas was forced to face her own health issues as the trials drew near. Following testing on her hamstring back in May, she had an MRI on her lower back, during which the medical professionals discovered cancer in her liver. She was horrified when they said the word cancer. Randall was concerned that the stress might show up somehow, maybe even in the track, but Thomas never publicly expressed her genuine concern during the whole thing. Luckily, the cancer was benign and wouldn’t need to be surgically removed. Her mother experienced an extraordinary form of relief at hearing that news, almost as if she were outside of herself. Her daughter was quite capable of competing.

Then came the difficulties: the competition with Felix that Thomas perceived as a “honour,” the passage of time, the background of FloJo, and the way her idol—a nine-time gold medallist—embraced her at the finish. Randall, the mother who regarded FloJo as her ideal and had nearly bought her daughter’s attention, found it difficult to make sense of things. She used phrases like “amazed” and “stunned,” despite the fact that track experts questioned whether Thomas could have broken the world record if she hadn’t lifted both arms in triumph during her last five strides. When asked if she would ever defeat FloJo, Thomas told reporters that she had “blacked out” and was unaware of the race. However, she went on; naturally, she could. She remarked, “I don’t want to impose boundaries on myself.”

For what reason would she? Al Joyner, the spouse of Griffith Joyner, witnessed Thomas’s historic run before watching Elaine Thompson-Herah surpass his wife’s Olympic record on Saturday night in Tokyo. He is seeing the sea change he has long anticipated, seeing female sprinters run faster and farther in a manner he thinks his late wife would have approved of. He wonders if, come Tuesday, when the 200-meter final is conducted here, Thompson-Herah would encourage Thomas’s competitive spirit. He is cheering for Thomas as well as the outcome of her success—that is, how she will bring FloJo and her legacy to the world—saying that “she’s ready to be on a different level now.”

In relation to it, Thomas keeps creating her own legacy. The previous Harvard student to win an Olympic gold medal was James Connolly, a triple jumper, who never completed his degree. Thomas would be the first graduate to win in history.

If that occurs, she should anticipate receiving more celebrity endorsements, increased notoriety, and a larger platform. The Olympian, who only lately came to see herself as such, will then use track as a starting point rather than a destination to speak out against injustice and demonstrate that a black sprinter can succeed in a sport that is primarily associated with white people. Her mother, who is still shocked that a different woman in a different living room could see her daughter compete in the Olympics and recognise in Thomas what she did in Felix all those years ago, remarked, “She’s doing exactly what she should be doing.”

In the Harvard days, Musa and Thomas would occasionally sit up late at night and plot out their futures. In order to “keep people accountable,” Musa explains, “we came up with strategies to show grace in a way that they might hear from.” She eventually turned those discussions into the podcast Aesthetics & Athletics, with the aim of empowering women in sports. She recently hosted a well-known guest.

Thomas is qualified to compete in the 200 and 4×100 relay events in Tokyo. Her best friend is in Seattle, and her mother is in Massachusetts. They will both see beyond a talented student and beyond an athlete. They will see both in one individual, each endeavour supporting the other; the busyness is not a hindrance or a distraction but rather a source of speed and energy.