Gabby Thomas has had enough. Amid good news flashes that celebrated her three gold wins at the 2024 Paris Olympics, the Harvard graduate couldn’t avoid conversations surrounding comparisons made between her and her teammate Sha’Carri Richardson for far too long. The premise was set — the Dallas native failed to clinch gold in the women’s 100-meter dash at the 33rd Games and the fans aren’t too convinced about her status as an elite sprinter.

The 27-year-old posted on TikTok just a couple of hours ago. In the brief video, Thomas can be seen making it clear that such infantile debates have no place in sports and should be ousted from the community’s mindset. Walking around on the streets, Gabby says absolutely nothing but drops a friendly reminder in a hair-flipping swag.

“Just a friendly reminder that you can uplift one woman without bringing down another,” asserts the Massachusetts resident on TikTok. Thomas’ gaze, looking at things beyond her phone camera while recording the clip, perhaps signifies her lack of attention to such trivial things. On the other hand, the stern but relaxed look on her face also underscores how the sprinter is absolutely determined not to let a farcical comparison get into her head.

The duo played crucial roles in helping Team USA win gold in the women’s 4x100m relay race at the Paris Games. Gabby ran a thrilling third leg of the sprint to pass on the baton to Sha’Carri, while still keeping her squad in the race for gold. Ensuring three smooth baton handovers without any significant errors, Richardson and Team America, despite trailing behind initially, anchored the race in style in 41.78 seconds, edging past Britain’s Daryll Neita to cross the finishing line first by a considerable margin. In an interview with Refinery 29, Sha’Carri confessed to listening to only Thomas, and the rest, was just a plain blur!

“I don’t hear anybody else but Gabby. If it’s not her voice, I can’t hear it. Everything else is a blur. Gabby’s voice automatically sends me into a place of determination and it sends me into a place of I know what time it is.

“[…] So she gives me the stick. She says, “Stick!” I get the stick. And she tells me to “Go! Go!” She doesn’t stop after just telling me to get the stick. She’s encouraging me on the way down the track.”

The relay race presented an opportunity for Richardson to show her mettle one more time after failing to bag gold in the women’s individual 100m race. Falling to Saint Lucia’s Julien Alfred in the individual race, SCR couldn’t do justice to her being the favorite in the event. With that, the relay race turned out to be the event where she managed to prove that Sha’Carri shouldn’t be discounted by fans. But remember the two indulged in a brief spat back in 2021

After a brief spat in 2021, Thomas moved mountains to re-bond with Richardson

Although the TikTok post didn’t take Richardson’s name, Gabby Thomas acknowledged that there were many other athletes who had toiled hard to become Olympians, and it would be disrespectful to their efforts to boycott the Olympics just because they came second. Thomas definitely knew a thing or two about struggles considering how her mother along with a 10-year-old Gabby moved from Mobile, Alabama to change their realities of leading a low-income life.

Back in 2021, Sha’Carri didn’t stop at the finish line when she ran up to the stands to hug her grandma and dad at the US Olympic trials. But things quickly turned south when her blood sample tested positive for cannabis. Richardson was eventually restricted from participating in the 2020 Tokyo Olympics, burying all her dreams of being an Olympic athlete. Naturally, it was a tough blow to the guts. The star later claimed that the result was a reflection of her personal troubles at the time, in order to escape the reality of dealing with the loss of her mother. Fans vouched that they would boycott watching the Games altogether!

Thomas took a stab at the raging online protests, “It really hurts to see so many black people choosing not to watch the Olympics this year,” Thomas posted. “There are so many black athletes who have put in YEARS of hard work for this moment- myself included. We want your support.

“Additionally, I worry some of the anger and disdain may be misplaced. The ‘Olympics’ and those at the IOC have nothing to do with current events taking place.”

Richardson hit back in no time. “Athletes that haven’t and will never beat me have a lot to say about or surrounding my situation. When most of them have said nothing to me showing their characters that y’all don’t see behind the races. The attention that is on track now and was because of very very few names. So if that’s where fans support lay, you can’t be mad at that.” The tweet has since been deleted.

While her plight wasn’t unfounded, it still made fans weary of giving her a hall pass over the matter. This time, however, Sha’Carri was looking for redemption walking into Paris. Both of them were ready, and after winning the relay 4x100m, scenes of a jubilant Gabby sharing an emotional hug with her colleague after their Olympic victory together unfolded. “I know she did her part. Now she is trusting me. Now she is believing in me. Now she is expecting me. She has every right to, because she did her thing to get me to go into a different phase, to continue to transfer that energy and that speed in which we did,” SCR was heard saying about their joint triumph in the City of Love.

Gabby was all too confident about Sha’Carri in return too, and deservedly so. “Passing the baton to Sha’Carri is a very special and unique thing. She’s so fast and we know we’re in good hands as soon as she gets her hands on the baton,” Thomas said (via The Mirror).

Are you also one of the folks who beamed with happiness seeing these two enigmatic runners share a laugh in Paris?