Gabby Thomas Says Her Next Chapter May Be Women’s Health Research

Triple Olympic champion Gabby Thomas said Friday that she may turn to research on women’s health once this season is over, telling reporters ahead of Saturday’s London Diamond League that the science serving female athletes has fallen well behind their results.

“Something that I am really passionate about is women’s health and women’s fitness and there’s definitely a big gap in research when it comes to that, especially at the elite level… maybe after this year I’ll look more into that,” she said.

The gap she described is measurable. A 2021 audit published in the Women in Sport and Physical Activity Journal reviewed 5,261 studies from six leading sport and exercise science journals published between 2014 and 2020, and found that only 6 percent studied women exclusively, against 31 percent that studied only men. Of the more than 12 million participants across those studies, 34 percent were female. Much of what elite athletes are told about training, recovery, and injury rests on data collected from men, a problem that reaches from Olympic finals down to everyday women’s running.

Thomas, 29, studied neurobiology at Harvard, where a class on unequal health outcomes in the American system, and their impact on people of color, first pointed her toward public health. She earned a master’s degree in epidemiology from the University of Texas in 2023 while training full time, NBC News reported in 2024. She confirmed Friday that a return to academia remains a possibility.

Her healthcare involvement extends well beyond the classroom. While preparing for the Tokyo Games, Thomas emailed Volunteer Healthcare Clinic in Austin, a free clinic founded in 1966 that treats about 1,000 uninsured patients each year, and became one of its roughly 400 volunteers. As Direct Relief reported in 2024, she calls the clinic’s patients at home, asking after their blood pressure numbers and whether they can make their appointments, and at one point volunteered nearly every week for about a year and a half. She also persuaded New Balance, her kit sponsor, to send the clinic more than 100 pairs of shoes for its patients.

“I volunteer at a healthcare clinic just to keep myself in the healthcare space and keep my mind working, but also focusing on just my life off the track,” she said Friday.

Thomas has long argued that the crowded life helps her run faster. In 2024 she told NBC News she was training three to six hours a day for Paris while volunteering at the clinic at night, and described her career approach as “basically running track part time.” That summer she won three gold medals in Paris, in the 200m, the 4x100m relay, and the 4x400m relay. She made the same case Friday. “Just doing both, it really helps to empower the other and it helps with motivation and enthusiasm… it helps to maintain like a healthy sense of identity,” she said.

Thomas is getting married this fall, and told reporters she has spent the year seeing family and friends, along with her two dogs. Her ambitions in healthcare are also a matter of record: in the same 2024 NBC News interview, she said she hoped one day to run a hospital or a nonprofit expanding access to care. And she has pressed the sport on its problems before, calling last year for lifetime coaching bans for anyone with a doping history, while scrutiny of how track and field treats its women athletes has widened on other fronts, including new broadcasting guidelines aimed at how cameras film them.

First there is a season to finish. Thomas returned this spring from the Achilles injury that ended her 2025 campaign and kept her out of last September’s World Championships in Tokyo. On Saturday she lines up against Julien Alfred, who has run 21.51 this season, the fastest in the field, in the 200m at London Stadium. From there her year points to the first World Athletics Ultimate Championship in Budapest, where she is automatically qualified as the reigning Olympic 200m champion. The women’s 200m final there is set for Sept. 13, the meet’s closing day.