Of course Jennifer Randall is thrilled that her daughter, Gabby Thomas, will head to Paris later this month to compete in her second Olympic Games. Young Gabby was always faster than her peers; her grade school soccer team strategy was to boot the ball over everyone else’s head and let Gabby chase it down. Randall was the one who told her she could do this, who when Gabby was 11 or 12 proclaimed that she would be an Olympic runner. “She rolled her eyes at me and sashayed out of the room,” Randall says. But a dozen years later, there Thomas was, earning a bronze medal in Tokyo in the 200 meters, and a silver in the 4x100, while Randall watched, delighted. She has her Paris itinerary all planned.
After Paris, Thomas hopes to compete in Los Angeles in 2028, and that's all fine with her mom. Great, even. But then that’s enough of that.
“I mean, come on!” Randall laments. “She has to get a Ph.D. I don’t even understand why she argues with me about this. It’s been obvious from the beginning. I think she’ll come to realize that I’m absolutely right. Like I’ve been right about all things, by the way.”
The 27-year-old Thomas, a bit of her preteen self peeking through, groans and laughs. “That’s her biggest goal in life right now,” she says.
Randall, a professor of education at Michigan, has spent nearly three decades instilling in Thomas and her twin brother, Andrew, an artist, that they can do and be anything they want to be. What Gabby Thomas wants to be is the president of a hospital. But first she has to finish getting what her mother calls life experience: that is, trying to win Olympic gold.
These days, when Thomas thinks about being good enough, she is generally referring to the weights she lifts, to the rest she gets, to the times she runs. And she tends to pass every test she gives herself: In 2023, she took silver at the world championships in the 200 meters and gold in the 4x100. In June, she won the Olympic trials in the 200 meters in 21.81 seconds, nearly a tenth of a second ahead of second place. But for a long time, she asked that question about herself as a person.
“I think that I have consistently been in uncomfortable situations where I had to rise to the occasion or rise to the environment that I was in,” she says. “We moved around quite a bit when I was younger, so I was kind of forced to be uncomfortable for a little bit and then make it work. Making new friends, developing new relationships, proving that I belonged in that space. It also comes with being a young Black girl, being in very predominantly white environments, and feeling like I needed to prove that I belonged in those environments and I wasn’t that different, and that I was smart enough, that I was pretty enough, that I was good enough."
Thomas attended The Williston Northampton School, a private boarding high school in Easthampton, Mass., before enrolling at Harvard. She says she felt like she had to prove she belonged in both environments. "I had to tell myself and really believe in my heart that I did belong," she says. "When I decided to study neurobiology, I’m in classes with people who—I can’t even tell you how insanely smart and ingenious those people are, but I just sat in those classes and contributed and asked questions, and I had to believe that I wasn’t asking stupid questions, or else I wasn’t going to make it.”
Early her freshman year, she found herself failing LS1B, introduction to internal life sciences. “I was actually failing,” she says. “Not like that cute ‘failing,’ where people are like, ‘Haha!’ Like, I was gonna drop the class.” If she did, she would either need to repeat the semester or choose a major other than neurobiology. But the professor convinced her she could do it and worked with her to make a plan. She graduated on time with that degree.
At times she felt the same way about track, which she initially ran because she was good at it and it was fun. But by the summer after her sophomore year at Harvard, she was about ready to be done with it. She wanted to focus more on studying global health. But the more she learned about other people’s lives, the easier hers seemed. (She also used her mother’s experience as a yardstick: Randall grew up as one of nine children in a two-bedroom house, the electricity out most days, and put herself through school with waitressing and teaching jobs, before raising Gabby and Andrew as a single mom. “I remember thinking, if she could do that, then whatever I was doing was not hard,” Thomas says.) She stuck with track, and—after agreeing with Randall that she would choose an elite running program near a school with an elite public health master’s program—moved to Austin, Texas.
“I was not even close to being an Olympian myself,” she says, “But I forced myself to go train with them, and I forced myself to get my butt kicked in practice every day for two years, so that when the time came, I was ready to make the Olympic team.”
This is the attitude her mother always hoped to instill in her.
“This is what I hope,” says Randall. “You know, we always try to work out our stuff on our kids. And I absolutely feel that way, and I have always felt that way, that I wasn’t good enough to be in different types of spaces. And I think many of the spaces that Gabby walks into are remarkably elite spaces. And I think many Black women suffer with this term that I hate, but it’s real: imposter syndrome. And I think what I wanted for Gabby was to not have that, to know that she was always smart, to know that she was always talented and gorgeous and all of these things. But the world tells her differently all the time, right? The world especially tells Black women all the time that this space does not belong to you. And her mom couldn’t undo the world. But what’s great about Gabby is that she walks into the spaces anyway, and that I’m proud of. I mean, at least I taught her to do that: Even when you feel like you don’t belong there, show up and show out. And that’s what she does, every single time.”
Says Thomas, “It is really hard. And there are definitely days where you think you don’t want to do it. There are so many days where I wanted to quit, but you just do it. Each day, you make a decision that you belong there. And eventually you do.”
Her challenge now is that everyone else knows she belongs, too. In 2021, she raced at Olympic Trials not expecting to make the team. She ran a 21.61 200-meter race, then the third-fastest time ever recorded. (“I am still in shock,” she said afterward. “I cannot believe I put up that time.”) In Tokyo, she wandered joyfully around the Olympic Village, just trying to soak it all in. She came home with those two medals. (Randall gave her about 30 seconds to celebrate before mentioning her fall semester at the University of Texas.)
In 2022, Thomas felt set to improve upon her Tokyo performance at the world championships, but she sustained a Grade 2 strain of her right hamstring in a training run two weeks before trials. She studied peer-reviewed literature and decided that daily three-hour sessions in a hyperbaric chamber would provide her best chance of healing in time. She recovered enough to make the finals at trials, but she finished eighth and did not qualify for worlds. (She was named to the team as a possibility on the relay squad, but the coaches did not use her.) She was crushed. Still, she believes that the time off helped her focus on the journey, which is perspective she needs now that she’s not an underdog anymore.
“Going into Tokyo, no one really believed in me, which made it a little bit easier,” she says. “It was really just about my journey and having fun. It’s all upside. And now the gold is really mine to lose, and every time I step on the track, it’s my race to lose. So you definitely have to have another reason for competing other than just winning. Winning cannot be your end all, be all to sport. It cannot be your reason to exist or reason to be. So for me, it’s about just being my best self. It’s about showcasing what you can do. And I know that there are a lot of people watching, especially the younger generation, and other girls who are watching us compete the same way that I did growing up. And so it’s: How can I be a great role model for them? How can I be an example for them? What do I want to leave the sport?”
The answer extends far beyond track. She got her master’s in public health and epidemiology from Texas, where she wrote her thesis on racial health disparities as an outcome of sleep issues. She spends 10 hours a week volunteering at an Austin health clinic, running an intervention program for patients with hypertension. (She convinced New Balance, one of her sponsors, to donate running shoes for them all. “Sneakers are really expensive!” she says “It really made their day.”) She has 365,000 Instagram followers, but Randall loves that “she has committed her life to working for people who will never, ever, ever know her name,” she says.
So Thomas will run the 200 meters and likely the 4x100 meters in Paris, then she will return to Austin, where she will continue on both tracks simultaneously.
“I’ve forced myself to do it for so long now that I do think that if I were to ever put myself in a situation where I wasn’t uncomfortable, I’d be uncomfortable with that,” she says. “I’d feel like I’m not growing. I would get bored. So I’m always kind of looking for that next challenge. Right now, it’s striving and chasing after a gold medal, and we’ll see what it will be after that.”
Her mom has a suggestion.
This article was originally published on www.si.com as Gabby Thomas Has Dreams of a Career in Healthcare, but for Now, She’s Set on Winning Olympic Gold.
