Gabby Thomas is golden.

After winning a silver medal in the 4x100 meter relay and a bronze in the 200 meters at the Tokyo Olympics, the former Florence resident cleared the field in the 200 on Tuesday to claim the gold medal with a time of 21.83 seconds.

“I’m really in disbelief because having an Olympic gold medal is something in my wildest dreams,” Thomas said. “But at the same time I know how hard I’ve fought for it.”

Thomas took the lead on the turn and her long strides distanced her from the field on the home stretch to easily take gold by 0.25 seconds.

“That’s what’s really special about her,” Thomas’ professional coach and three-time American Olympian Tonja Buford-Bailey said. “She can hold a top-end speed for a long time.”

She is the first American woman to win the 200 since Allyson Felix, who won in London 2012. Thomas has said that Felix was a major inspiration for the start of her own track career, which began as a seventh grader at the Williston Northampton School. Thomas won 12 New England titles at Williston and holds five school records. Her high school track coach, Martha McCullagh, was in attendance in Paris on Tuesday.

Thomas was the favorite coming into Tuesday’s race, especially after her strong performances in the first two rounds and the absence of her two biggest rivals – Jamaican sprinters Elaine Thompson-Herah and Shericka Jackson. She opened her 2024 Olympics on Sunday, easily winning her first-round heat with a time of 22.20 seconds. She also breezed through Monday’s semifinals, coasting to the line with a time of 21.86 that made her the No. 1 qualifier in Tuesday’s final.

“I was thinking about that earlier,” Thomas said. “I cannot believe how much pressure I feel right now. It almost feels unreal. I can’t believe that a woman has to take on this much pressure. 

St. Lucian sprinter Julien Alfred, Thomas’ biggest threat to gold and the winner of the 100, took silver. American Brittany Brown took bronze.

When Thomas won the bronze medal in Tokyo, the stadium was empty and the podium was social-distanced. This time, Stade de France was full of 80,000 fans cheering her on. Her mother, unable to attend in Tokyo, cried in the stands after Thomas’ win. 

"When I walked out in this stadium and I knew I had all my friends and family here, I just knew that I had it,” Thomas said. “It was a confidence that you can’t really describe. Of course there was pressure, but I felt confident.”

As Thomas paraded around the track holding the American flag, she flashed the smile that she was well-known for at Williston. Those connected to her Hampshire County roots are as much in disbelief of her dominance now as they were then.

“I remember joking in seventh grade about like, ‘Oh, Gabby you’re going to go to the Olympics,’” former Williston track teammate Lena Gandevia said. “It was just a joke, at the time we had no idea. Maybe she was just fast for New England, maybe she was just fast for Williston. We didn’t really have a sense in the grand scheme of things of how incredible she was.”

Born in Atlanta in 1996, Thomas moved to Florence in 2007 when her mother, Jennifer Randall, took a professorship at UMass. At the insistence of her mother, she started running track in seventh grade at Williston, and immediately flashed the natural speed that earned her a gold medal on Tuesday.

She finished third in the 100 at New Englands as a seventh grader – competing against high schoolers – and then never lost the race again. She also excelled in cross country and basketball and played soccer all the way through her senior year. She was a “real threat and a goal scorer,” her soccer coach Monique Conroy said. 

Teachers at Williston described Thomas as motivated and bright and said she asked great questions. She wasn’t afraid to take chances or experiment, they said.

After graduating from Williston in 2015, Thomas chose Harvard over an array of national track powerhouses and won 22 Ivy League titles in three years of competing for the Crimson before turning pro and moving to Austin, Texas to train with Buford-Bailey and her all-Black, all-female running group. 

“This has been six years in the making, head down, working hard, going to really hard meets, pushing yourself, and now it’s here and I’ve done it,” Thomas said. “This is the happiest moment of my life.”

Thomas graduated with a degree in neurobiology and global health and health policy from Harvard in 2019 and then earned a master’s degree in public health at the University of Texas in 2022.

“I would forget she’s in school,” Buford-Bailey said. “She’d be like ‘I have class today’ and I’d be like ‘huh?’ That’s how easily she managed it.”

Thomas also volunteers part-time at a hypertension clinic for uninsured patients. When she retires from her running career, she said she’d like to run a hospital or a health equity non-profit organization, and she wants to start a foundation dedicated to increasing healthcare access.