EUGENE, Ore. — After the women’s 200-meter final was over, and she secured a spot on the U.S. Olympic team, McKenzie Long said she heard the craziest thing from Gabby Thomas.
“She said she had a dream about me,” a beaming Long said, holding a bouquet of white and purple flowers, a bronze medal hanging from her neck. “She was like, ‘Yeah, I had a dream that you were going to be an Olympian.’” I was like, ‘You didn’t want to tell me this before we got out here on this line.’”
Thomas said she didn’t want to jinx the dream, so she kept it to herself until after the race. But Long — before perhaps the biggest race of her life, in her best event, with a chance to make Paris — could’ve used the anxiety relief.
That proclamation from Thomas, Long implied, might’ve worked wonders before the race. Because belief from an idol works wonders for confidence.
“I literally tell her all the time, ‘I want to be you.’ She’s inspiring,” Long said. “That’s my goal. I want to be like Gabby Thomas.”
It’s taken some getting used to for Thomas, this new skin she’s in. The one with expectations. The one with experience. The one on the marquee.
Sometimes, she said, she wishes she could slink back into a former normalcy, when it was just about the running and…
