Felix gave her a shout out.

"I think it was amazing," said Felix, who qualified for Tokyo in the 400 meters. "She has been getting better and better every single round."

Now, they're Olympic teammates.

"Her humility and grace and how good she is at what she does, she's really the one that has been inspiring," Thomas said. "To be on team with her makes me want to cry."

Thomas has been building toward this sort of success for a while. She won the 2018 NCAA 200m indoor championship while running for Harvard. She rewrote the school's record book, too, setting top marks in everything from the 60m to 300m.

After graduating from Harvard and turning pro, she moved to Austin, Texas, to work with the "Bailey Bunch". It's a group led by Tonja Buford-Bailey, a bronze 400m hurdles medalist at the 1996 Atlanta Games, and features the likes of Morolake Akinosun, who won a gold medal in 2016 as part of the 4x100 relay team.

"I was pretty much OK with going anywhere where people would push me to run fast," Thomas said.

At some point, Thomas plans to finish her epidemiology degree－a useful topic as the world deals with the COVID-19 pandemic. Her goal is to one day work in healthcare.

Her timing for that endeavor, though, may have just changed.

"Now I'm just going to have to map out a different trajectory for my life," she said. "My dream was to make the Olympic team, not to even win the Olympic trials－not even to break the meet record. Now that I've accomplished those as well, I'm just going to set higher goals and I'm excited about that."

Agencies Via Xinhua