The 27-year-old Harvard grad is always looking for her next challenge. First up: chasing a medal at this summer’s Games.
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.
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. “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.
The summer after her sophomore year at Harvard, Thomas nearly gave up running track. / Patrick Smith/Getty Images 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.”
“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.
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