Of all the stories of Olympian Gabby Thomas’ athletic prowess during her six years at the Williston Northampton School in Easthampton, possibly the most revealing came in cross country, a sport the sprinter competed in for just one season.

Thomas chose to run cross country in her junior year at Williston as a way to improve her times on the track, where she specialized in the 100-meter dash — as far from the 5K as a runner can get.

At one of her first cross country meets, she blew past the field as the group headed into the woods. Midway through the race, with no competitor in sight, she grew tired and started walking. She wasn’t used to running races this long.

After a few moments, her captain ran by her, asking “What are you doing? Keep up the pace!”

Thomas started running again, overtook her captain and won the meet.

That was just one remarkable achievement in a series of dazzling displays for Thomas at Williston, where she picked up five school records and won 11 New England titles. She eventually won 22 Ivy League titles while at Harvard, and in 2021 competed for the first time on the biggest track and field stage there is — the Olympics in Toyko.

At those Olympics, Thomas won bronze in the 200 meters and silver in the 4x100 relay. This June, she won the U.S. Olympic Trials in the 200 and is the top contender for gold in Paris. The first round of the 200 airs at 4:55 a.m. on Sunday, the semifinals are at 2:45 p.m. on Monday, and the final is at 3:40 p.m. on Tuesday.

Off the track, Thomas, 27, a former resident of Florence, graduated from Harvard with a degree in neurobiology and global health and health policy. She earned her master’s degree in public health at the University of Texas in 2022 and currently works part-time at a volunteer clinic in Austin while training.

Fierce competitor

Conversations with a half-dozen people connected to Thomas and her beginnings at Williston reveal a fierce competitive drive, a brilliant smile and some truly remarkable stories. She didn’t just dominate the competition on the track or in cross country, she also put up memorable performances in soccer, basketball and the weight room.

Initially, when Thomas was deciding on a spring sport for her seventh grade year at Williston, she wanted to play softball because some of her friends played the sport. At the urging of her mother, she chose track, and showed unbelievable natural speed from the very beginning, teammates and coaches said.

“We’d be at the finish line and it’d be like ‘OK, who’s got Gabby on the watch?’” said Monique Conroy, Thomas’ soccer coach who also timed her track races in middle school. “And then we’d click it and then we’d have her time and then there’d be literally a pause for another 10 yards before the next finishers would come.”

As a seventh grader, Thomas placed third in the 100 at New Englands. She never lost the race again.

The 100 was her specialty at Williston, and Thomas set and re-set the New Englands meet records in her sophomore, junior and senior years. In her junior and senior years, she won all four events she competed in at New Englands, taking home golds in the 100, 200, 4x100 relay, long jump (junior year) and triple jump (senior year).

Thomas and teammate Anthony Aquadro both started competing in the long jump around the same time. They put up similar distances in their first few meets together and Aquadro beat her in one pre-meet practice. When they got to the meet, Thomas cleared her personal best by a foot.

“I was so upset,” Aquadro said. “I was like ‘damn, I thought we were like neck-and-neck there’ and she just decided to pull that out of nowhere.”

She also tried the high jump for a time. With no knowledge of form or technique, she cleared the marks of teammates who had been practicing the event for years, Williston track teammate Lena Gandevia said.

Gandevia ran the 4x100 relay with Thomas for five years at Williston, and got used to the miraculous times Thomas posted in the anchor leg. At the New Englands meet one year, Thomas received the baton in fifth or sixth place but completely outpaced the pack by the finish.

“We had a lot of security,” Gandevia said, “that no matter how far behind we were, she would bring it home.”

The ‘gold standard’

Every year, in every event, Thomas cleared the competition easily. By the end of her career, opposing coaches had had enough.

“You just don’t get somebody at your school with six years of being at the top,” Thomas’ high school track coach Martha McCullagh said. “By the time she was a junior and senior, we had coaches from other schools coming up to us and saying, ‘Is she going to graduate any time soon?’”

As Thomas grew older, she spent more time in the Williston weight room, where she worked with strength and conditioning coach Blayne Lapan. During the winter season in her junior and senior years, she worked out with Lapan five days a week, spending four days focusing on mobility, change of direction, strength training and conditioning. On the fifth day, she focused solely on speed.

From the beginning of her training with Lapan, she impressed. Almost immediately, and without any training, she front squatted 200 pounds.

“Especially with her body type, long and very slender back in the day, it was shocking that she was as strong as she was from the beginning,” Lapan said.

Whenever Lapan needed to demonstrate any linear sprinting exercise out in the field, he used Thomas as an example. She was the “gold standard” for both male and female athletes in the strength and conditioning program, he said.

Thomas also played soccer from seventh grade until her senior year, except for the one cross country season her junior fall. She played forward for Williston and was so fast that Conroy often told her to simply kick the ball ahead of her defenders and then beat them to the spot. If she started even with a defender and they each took five strides, Thomas’ legs were so long that she’d end up two full strides ahead, Conroy said.

Before every match, Conroy approached the officials to warn them about Thomas.

“She will not be offside,” Conroy would say. “She’s that fast.”

Sure enough, after many games, the officials would thank her.

“My goodness, you were correct,” Conroy remembered them saying. “Thanks for letting us know.”

Much of this was against athletes whose primary sport was soccer. In one match against Loomis Chaffee, with two Division I commits on defense playing deep on her, Thomas split the two defenders and nearly scored.

“I remember in my head, thinking ‘Oh, when she gets to varsity it’s not going to be like that, other girls are fast,’” Aquadro said. “And then she got on to the varsity team and was still destroying everyone on the field.”

By her senior year, Thomas had grown into her legs more, and her work with Lapan to strengthen them showed. Now, when she got a pass far ahead of the defense, she was able to control the ball better and score more often. She was a “real threat and a goal scorer,” Conroy said.

And despite her track responsibilities and ongoing college recruitment, Thomas remained committed to the soccer team. In the fall of her senior year, on the weekend she was slated to visit Harvard, the soccer team had an important game, and Thomas wasn’t sure how she’d get from the game to Cambridge. She played the game, and afterward, Conroy drove her to the Worcester bus station so she could go on her visit.

“She could’ve easily, anybody else could have said, ‘I can’t be at that game,’” Conroy said. “But we’re like ‘Gabby, we need you.’ And you know what, she made it work.”

Later that season, the team was on the bus together after an away game when Thomas learned she would be going to Harvard. The whole bus erupted in claps and cheers.

Thomas also played basketball through her sophomore year, and though she opted for the strength and conditioning program as her winter sport in her junior and senior seasons, former Williston athletics director Mark Conroy said she would have been a contributor to the varsity team if she had stuck with it.

In her senior year, despite not playing basketball in over a year, she participated in a schoolwide three-on-three tournament with Conroy and a junior varsity boys basketball player. Against varsity basketball players, some of whom went on to play in college, Thomas dove for balls, clamped her matchup and made baskets left and right to lead her team to a tournament title.

“She just willed it,” Mark Conroy recalled. “It was pretty incredible, just to watch her carry us. She was definitely the difference-maker.”

Though Thomas is nine years removed from Williston, she still has a sizable cheering section of western Mass. connections. The Conroys, the McCullaghs, her old adviser Janine Whipple and several others are in a group chat they use for watching Thomas’ races together. Her old teammates are as much in awe of her now as they were back at the beginning.

“I remember joking in seventh grade about like, ‘Oh, Gabby you’re going to go to the Olympics,’” 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.”

Connor Pignatello is a Gazette sports reporter. He can be reached at cpignatello@gazettenet.com.