Out of North Philly and Central High, Jessika Gbai shocked the Olympics by just showing up

ST. DENIS, France — She was not supposed to be here Tuesday, and she knew that she was not supposed to be here Tuesday, and so Jessika Gbai practically pranced onto the track at Stade de France when the public-address announcer introduced her. The rest of the world wondered whether Gabby Thomas would win the gold medal in the women’s 200 meters, and Thomas would soon fulfill those expectations. But Gbai had the rare and blessed bliss of knowing that she already had surprised people just by earning the right to stride to the starting line, of knowing that there was no pressure on her at all.

Here was Jessika Gbai, 25 years old, from North Philadelphia and Central High School and Howard University, the daughter of two natives of Côte d’Ivoire in West Africa, the latest of late bloomers, running the 200 in 22.70 seconds — nearly a full second behind Thomas’s winning time of 21.83 — finishing dead last and not giving a damn. Why would she? Gbai won just by making it that far, by somehow posting a personal-best 22.36 in Monday’s semifinals to nab the last of the eight spots in the final. Her glory was in getting there.

“No stress,” she said. “I really had nothing to lose.”

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This is the kind of story that draws people to the Olympics. There are underdogs, and then there is someone like Gbai, who might be more appropriately called a subterranean-dog. That’s not an insult. That’s reality, given how little she had done to distinguish herself as an athlete at Central. She was a terrific kid and a terrific teammate, and those are wonderful qualities, but they don’t qualify a sprinter seven years later to compete in her sport’s biggest event on her sport’s brightest night.

“She wasn’t always the fastest on our team,” Nick Kosiek, Central’s assistant track and field coach, said via email Tuesday. “She was ALWAYS in good spirits, and she always wanted others to be as well. If she saw you down, she would try to make you smile either with terrible jokes or a story about her day. She loved the sport.”

The day of her graduation, for instance, happened to coincide with a national meet in North Carolina. Gbai had told her fellow sprinters on Central’s 4x100 relay team that she would get to the meet no matter what. So immediately after the ceremony, she caught a train to North Carolina. Central head coach Fred McCray picked her up at the station, and Gbai competed in the event.

“She’s not just a great runner,” Kosiek said. “She’s just great.”

She was far from a great runner, though, when she arrived at Howard in 2017, the same year that the university hired David Oliver as head coach, charging him with turning around a track and field program that hadn’t been ranked among the top 50 in the nation since 1988 — just about three decades. He did not regard Gbai as a cornerstone of the renaissance. As a freshman, she wanted to walk on to the team. He hadn’t recruited her. He’d never even heard of her.

“She was not anyone you would think would make it to this point,” Oliver said by phone Tuesday. “Howard as a university, we’re not an LSU, a UCLA, a USC. We’ve had about 10 people represent us on the international stage.”

Oliver himself was one. A 2004 Howard graduate, he won the bronze medal in the 110-meter hurdles at the 2008 Summer Games in Beijing, making him the program’s last Olympian before Gbai. Then he won the Jesse Owens Award as the top track athlete in the United States in 2010 and the world championship in the 110 hurdles in 2013.

“But I was at least someone who was recruited out of high school,” he said. “She was someone who showed up and said, ‘I just want to run.’ I looked it up. She was running the 200 in 26 seconds in high school.”

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There was a reason for that, Gbai said: “Compared to other schools in Philadelphia, we didn’t have everything needed to really bring out our talent.” Central’s track was made of loose gravel, and on those occasions when they had to practice indoors, the team members ran through the school’s hallways and basement, slowing down and cutting on the hard linoleum floors. The workouts gave her shin splints.

“Going through that struggle really gives you a warrior’s mindset,” said Gbai, who added that she was dealing with a sore hamstring Tuesday night. “You can push through everything. No matter what comes your way, you can push through it.”

After training with Oliver for more than a year, Gbai officially became part of Howard’s track team for the 2018-19 season. She ran the 200 in 23.51 seconds, setting the school record. She was part of a relay team that established the Mid-Eastern Athletic Conference record in the 4x400 (3 minutes, 28.39 seconds). At collegiate meets, her opponents started pointing out that she had the perfect surname for a sprinter. Go ahead. Say it aloud. It’s the bidding of farewell.

In 2020, she came within three-tenths of a second of qualifying for the Tokyo Olympics. Though she was a double major in biology and political science, though she was a national All-American and a three-time member of the conference’s All-Academic team, she put aside her plans to attend medical school to turn pro. “It seemed like I had a future for myself,” she said. There’s still a rawness, a slight lack of efficiency and refinement, to the way she runs. She believes there is room for her to improve.

“Even now, with me not having the proper technique and all that stuff, I know that once I get that together, I’ll be better,” she said. “These are things that keep motivating me.”

She raced in the last of Monday night’s three semifinal heats, and because she was preparing for her heat, she did not see the results of the first two. When she finished, she had no idea that she had qualified for Tuesday’s final. Then one of the officials walked over to her and said, Congratulations, you made it to the next round, and Gbai began to cry.

“It took me a while to realize what happened, and I started celebrating,” she said. “And I was like, ‘Hold on. Calm down. She might come back and say it was a mistake.’ I just couldn’t believe it in the moment. I’m very proud of myself.”

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Howard’s women’s track team has won the last three MEAC championships — a level of success that Gbai helped to inspire, a level of success that makes it virtually impossible for a story like hers to emerge there again. “Now that we have gotten a national ranking,” Oliver said, “we would never get another Jessika Gbai on the team. We don’t have the space or time to invest in that sort of athlete. This really is a fairy tale.”

The sweetest kind. For the second time, Jessika Gbai showed up out of nowhere and said, I just want to run. For the second time, she earned the right to carry herself with all the pride she possesses, in a place she was never supposed to be.