America, the search is over. Our next great sprinter superwoman has arrived.

Her name is Gabby Thomas, Olympic gold medalist in the women’s 200 meters. And her reign began just after the starting gun went off on Tuesday night inside a packed Stade de France.

Thomas burst out of the blocks, and the collective breath of American track fandom sighed. The curse of the bad starts that have plagued American sprinters in Paris was over. As her long, wavy ponytail popped up to vertical, it was clear even with the staggered start that she was toe-to-toe with the woman on her immediate right: Julien Alfred, reigning fastest woman in the world after winning the Olympic 100 meters just two days earlier.

That’s all Thomas needed.

Crossing the line 21.83 seconds later, a full body width ahead of the rest of the field, Thomas raised her arms on her head in a mixture of elation and shock.

“I got to hear the crowd roar and I knew that all of my friends and family and  my community was behind me. So that feeling was indescribable,” she said. “It was the happiest moment of my life.”

Alfred snagged silver in 22.08, and Brittany Brown came up big for Team USA in 22.20 to make it a 1-3 punch for the second running event in a row and to put the exclamation point on a stunning night for the American track and field.

It’s the first time the U.S. has claimed victory in this event since Allyson Felix won gold 12 years ago at the 2012 Games less than three hundred miles away in London. Felix retired from professional sport in 2022, leaving a void on the track in her wake but channeling her drive into trailblazing initiatives for women athletes, including the first Olympic village nursery ever in Paris.

And sure enough, tonight could not feel more like a ceremonial passing of the torch from the 11-time Olympic medalist to the dazzling 27-year-old she inspired.

A Diamond Under Pressure

From the outside, Thomas’s meteoric rise looks clandestine. She took bronze in the 200 meters at the pandemic-delayed 2020 Tokyo Olympics three years ago. She worked her way up to silver at the world championships in Budapest last summer. There was only one place to go in Paris.

And she came to Paris with a world leading time of 21.78, which she ran en route to winning the U.S. Olympic Trials in June. But there was a lot of pressure to surmount along the way.

Few American track stars have been hyped more in glossy NBC primetime packages, ads, and news articles than the 2019 Harvard graduate who now uses her master’s degree in epidemiology from the University of Texas to volunteer at a health clinic for underserved populations there in Austin. This ascendence came to the forefront in April, when Alexis Ohanian, a Reddit co-founder and the husband of tennis phenom Serena Williams, anointed Thomas as the face of his new women’s only-track meet, Athlos, slotted for September in New York City.

She’s the golden girl, not only for our national track and field team, but you could say (and I will) for the country at large.

And yet, as she’s earned more success, so too, the weight of expectations have mounted.

“It’s a lot more fun to run when people aren’t expecting things of you. It’s a win-win. If you run well, then great. If you don’t run well, ‘Well, hey you had the experience,’” she said after the race.

After the empty stadium of Tokyo, the races, like the expectations, got bigger and bigger. A packed house at the world championships took the 2020 Olympics to another level.

“I had never experienced that before, but it prepared me for this race,” Thomas said. “And I remember thinking, ‘I don’t know how people can deal with the amount of pressure that we’re about to put on ourselves as athletes here at the Paris Olympics.’ There are so many people in the stands. This is a new age of social media where everyone’s watching us and have immediate commentary.”

In case that wasn’t enough, America has been holding an audition for the Next Great Woman Sprinter since Felix retired two years ago. Sha’Carri Richardon was an obvious frontrunner. After her silver in the 100 meters this week, her fate remains in the balance. But even before that fateful 100, I think you could argue that Thomas was the favorite-in-waiting. She has the story. She has the poise. And most importantly, she showed the promise.  She just had to prove it on the world’s biggest stage.

How Gabby Thomas won the Olympic 200 Meters

As Thomas walked out onto the track on Tuesday evening, her eyes glimmered with a steady, ferocious determination rarely seen on her effervescent face. She knew she could win, even before reigning world champion and second-fastest woman in this event ever Shericka Jackson withdrew from the meet. And she seemed to want that win more than anyone else out there.

The pressure was enormous, but she remained calm—she always does before races, eschewing pump-up music for the zen of her own thoughts. After placing her white and highlighter green New Balance spikes in the blocks just so and lining up her fingers on the purple mondo, she gazed down the length of the track and found her external focus.

While Thomas may not have the raw speed of the likes of 100-meter specialists like Alfred, she more than makes up for it in power and strength when the distance is doubled. After that textbook start, Thomas harnessed her unparalleled power to pull through the turn in first. With each pump of her perfectly squared arms, she pulled further and further away from the field, her face a composed grimace of grit.

In front of a sold-out Stade de France, Thomas powered her long legs down the straight away, her cadence seemingly slowing as her speed inexplicably soared before giving way to one of the most iconic celebratory reactions of all time.

“I did not realize that I had won this race until I crossed the line,” Thomas said. “I knew that I was going to have to execute until the finish. I have an Olympic champion in the lane right next to me. I had Brittany [Brown], who got second in our trials, right next to me. So the race wasn’t over until it was over.”

It’s the type of process-over-results mindset that creates champions. But for the 70,000 people sitting in the stadium, millions more screaming at their TVs from home, and even Felix watching from across town in the NBC newsroom, that A-plus start had sealed the deal.

“It was over the moment she came off that curve,” Felix told Mike Tirico on NBC just moments later.

Putting on a Clinic

Thomas has become such a fixture of American track and field royalty so quickly, it’s easy to forget that just a few years ago, she was just an Ivy League runner there for an education and considering quitting the sport entirely. Those doubts crept in again after she turned pro her junior year in 2018.

“The growing pains of joining a professional training group, there are a lot of egos. There are just a lot of moving parts, a lot of things going on. I didn’t think that I was going to be cut out for it,” Thomas said.

Plus, her mom, Jennifer Randall, who raised Thomas and her twin brother Andrew as a single mom pinching pennies as a teacher and earning a PhD in education, would prefer that Thomas prioritize her own education anyway.

Even this year when asked whether her mom would be more proud if she earned a PhD or an Olympic gold medal, Thomas said without hesitation: “The PhD. Not to say that she doesn’t support my track career. She loves what I’m doing on the track. But my mom has always instilled that the most important thing was education.”

While Thomas has defied the parental pressure, so far, that influence permeates her perspective. She moved to Austin, Texas to earn her masters and train under Tonja Buford-Bailey, herself an Olympic bronze medalist in the 400-meter hurdles. She runs the hypertension program at a volunteer healthcare clinic to give her life balance and to give back. If she doesn’t reach all of her goals on the track, it’s okay. She has other dreams she’s working towards, too.

Now that Thomas has accomplished her dream on the track, she doesn’t know what’s next. But she does know she will continue to keep her head down. There are more races to run, and more peoples’ lives to touch.

“I want young girls to look at us as strong female athletes and feel like they can do it too,” she said. “I want them to feel like they’re encouraged to go into professional sports. I want them to feel encouraged to pursue their dreams, no matter how big or small. And I hope when they look at me and see what I do, they’re inspired to work hard. I hope they’re inspired to be kind to people and to give back to their communities when they can.”

It’s another dream Felix and Thomas have in common.

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