Gabby Thomas Was Thrilled With Bronze in Tokyo. Now Only Gold Will Do

Like all Olympic sprinters, American 200-m star Gabby Thomas ramped up her training in July, in the weeks prior to the Paris Games. She did reps on successive days, to mimic the three rounds she’ll have to run, starting Aug. 4 through the women’s 200-m final on Aug. 6., to win the Olympic title. 

She paid closer attention to her diet too, cutting back on pizza in particular. 

Thomas, however, broke up her training routine in a unique fashion. Moments before hopping on a video interview with TIME from Austin, where she lives, she had tended to a call with a director of Volunteer Healthcare Clinic, a facility that offers medical services to uninsured patients. Thomas, who received a master’s in public health a year ago from the University of Texas, volunteers as the director of the hypertension program at the facility, managing fellow volunteers and interacting with patients. She dedicates around 7 to 10 hours a week to the clinic when she’s not competing.

She believes this work has benefitted her running. “Having the balance is really helpful,” Thomas says. “When I volunteer at the health care clinic, it's just a release of a lot of the stress and pressures from the track. And then a lot of times when I'm at the clinic, I'm thinking, ‘Well, I can't wait to get back to the track.’ So it's give-and-take. But I think it's just really healthy.”

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Thomas, 27, has come into her own since she seemingly emerged out of nowhere three years ago at the U.S. Olympic track-and-field trials in Eugene, Ore., and clocked what was then the fastest 200-m time since Florence Griffith Joyner set the world record in 1988. While the Tokyo Games, with its isolation rules and daily COVID-19 testing, was a negative experience for many athletes, Thomas—just happy to be there—actually enjoyed herself in Japan. “I was just so wide-eyed,” she says. Thomas finished third in the 200-m at her first Olympics. “Getting a bronze medal was, at the moment, all I needed,” she says. “I was so excited to say that I was an Olympic medalist.”

She’s grown hungrier since those halcyon days. But with that competitive drive—and ensuing success—comes greater expectations. During this year’s Olympic trials, Toyota ads depicting Thomas receiving a send-off to Paris—and winning the 200-m Olympic final—ran on a loop. The spots would have gone viral, for all the wrong reasons, if she had failed to make the team.

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“The pressure to qualify is even more so than the pressure to win gold at the actual Olympics,” says Thomas. She won the 200 m in Eugene, clocking the two fastest times of the year—21.78 seconds in the semifinal, and 21.81 in the final—in the process. The stress of qualification behind her, “I feel like I took a really deep breath,” she says. 

But Thomas insists she hasn’t let her guard down. She won 200-m silver at last year’s world championships, in Budapest, to go with her Olympic bronze. So only gold in Paris could complete her podium trifecta. 

“I would be lying if I said I didn't expect a gold for myself,” says Thomas. “I would be disappointed if I didn't get that. But it's really about the gold coming to me, and me doing everything I can to make that happen.”

(In the relays, Thomas won world-championship gold in the 4x100-m in Budapest, and Olympic silver in that race in Tokyo. She’s a near-lock to run in the 4x100 Olympic relay final, on Aug. 9.)

Born in Atlanta, Thomas moved to the Boston area when her mother, education professor Jennifer Randall, got a job at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst when Thomas was 10. (Randall now works at the University of Michigan.) While on the track-and-field team at Harvard, Thomas got interested in the subject of sleep. “It was a huge conversation in our training,” she says. She graduated in 2019, having majored in neurobiology and global health, and for her master’s thesis at Texas, she wrote about racial disparities in sleep epidemiology. “African Americans were more likely to have issues with sleep for social reasons and biological reasons,” she says. “It led them to have lower life expectancy.”

Thomas still plans to pursue a career in public health after track and field, but she’s shifted her career ambitions a bit, from being a hospital CEO to running a nonprofit health outfit, like the one where she works now. “I can really see the difference that it makes in the community,” she says. “It's a true, tangible difference, and it's really fulfilling.”

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But first, she has designs on improving her sport. She was an outspoken critic of the decision by the most prominent professional track circuit, the Wanda Diamond League, to shift its U.S. media rights from Peacock to FloSports, a more expensive streaming service, in 2025. “Anytime that you're just limiting our sport and the visibility of our sport and putting it behind a pretty high paywall, it's disappointing,” she says. On September 26 Thomas will participate in an event that hopes to deliver much-needed buzz to track and field outside the Olympic cycle: a women’s-only track event sponsored by Alexis Ohanian, co-founder of Reddit and founder of the venture-capital fund 776. The 776 Invitational, which will be held in New York City, will offer a $60,000 first-place prize for race winners (the Diamond League offers $10,000 to the winner of its regular series races, and $30,000 for its finals).

Initiatives like the 776 Invitational, and the track-and-field league former Olympic champion Michael Johnson plans to launch next year, could shake up the sport. “You have to make sure that the athletes you want to watch are going head-to-head consistently, like every other sport,” says Thomas. “So once that's kind of fixed, and I think these leagues will fix it, it will incentivize athletes to run. So we'll have a great sport and great entertainment.” 

In Paris, she’ll have stiff competition. Jamaica’s Shericka Jackson topped Thomas in Budapest in August; her finish at those worlds, 21.41 seconds, is the new second-fastest ever, trailing Flo-Jo by just seven-hundredths of a second. And Thomas’ American teammates, recent NCAA champion McKenzie Long and Brittany Brown, own the world’s next-fastest times in the world this year. 

Tough opponents, all. But Thomas knows they’re beatable. “The support that I've had over the years of this journey has been incredible,” she says. “It's really kept me going and kept me motivated. I feel like an entirely new athlete. I'm excited to show you guys what I've been working on.”