“When I graduated from college, I came into this sport sooo naive. After six years, I just want better for athletes. We deserve it. My goal is to leave this sport better than I found it 🤞🏽.” This is what Gabby said in her recent tweet. Comments? One said, “Never ask a man his salary, a woman her age, or gabby thomas why she missed 3 drug tests in 2020.” In May 2020, Gabby Thomas was temporarily suspended because she was accused of missing three anti-doping tests in a year. But then, in July, the suspension was lifted after she provided evidence. Five years have passed, and the incident is highlighted again. Now, the Olympian is ready to clear the air.

“I was never banned, I never committed any type of anti-doping violation,” said Gabby Thomas in her recent TikTok addressing those concerns. Talking to all the young athletes, she thoroughly explained how the process works. The Olympian informed that once you hit a certain speed in track and field, you will have to get into anti-doping testing. And it doesn’t matter if you’re a pro, in college, or just fast for fun. And that there are two organizations responsible for the same. USADA and World Athletics. Now giving an upper hand to World Athletics as having a harder test, she said it’s not just drug tests. 

The 3x Olympic gold medalist shared, “You actually have to upload your whereabouts into an app every single day.” She further informed that you have to log your whereabouts every single day, from 5 AM to 11 PM, in an app. Where you sleep, eat, train, study, everything. And you’ve got to update as soon as plans change. The point? Surprise. The examiners can show up anywhere, anytime. Thomas has been intervened by USADA officials at places such as “pickleball, rooftop bars, town lake, you name it,” as per the Olympic gold medalist. So what went wrong with her? She didn’t understand it at first. 

Talking of her junior year, she said, “I got an email saying that I needed to put my whereabouts in, and I had no idea what that email was. I didn’t have an agent. I asked my coach and my teammates, but they did not know what it was because we’re not involved in the professional tracking field. So I thought it was a scam.”

But she eventually started entering her Harvard dorm and practice schedule into the app, even though going pro had never crossed her mind. From junior to senior year, a tester named Danielle showed up now and then. She’d take the test and move on with her day. Then she remembered missing three of them.

Number 1. “One time it was about 8 p.m., 8:30 p.m., something like that. I went to go see a movie with my friends. Danielle showed up at my Harvard dorm and sat there, and then called me and let me know that she was waiting to drug test me. I said, Okay, I’m coming and left the movie theater, went to the Harvard dorm to go take the drug test, and she was gone,” Gabby shared. The Olympian argued that Danielle told her that she couldn’t wait more than ten minutes for a test, but the rules actually allow testers to wait up to an hour at the designated spot. Gabby Thomas was marked for a missed test, and she did not realize its severity. “I just had one missed test and I didn’t really care,” she said.

Number 2. Thomas said, “The next time she came to test me, I was staying in my Harvard dorm again, and I went to get food with my friends on campus at this Thai restaurant, and Danielle came to test me. This time, she did not give me a phone call. She just waited at the door.” She explained that the tester saw her Instagram story, tagging a Thai restaurant nearby, but instead of going there to test her, she screenshotted it and marked it as a missed test. The US athlete said, “So a few weeks later, I get notified that that’s my second missed test…I’m thinking, oh, I missed a test. Dang it, I’ll get the next one, but I definitely was not thinking, oh, they’re about to ban me.”

Number 3. “Third missed test was, I was actually at Yale at my boyfriend’s dorm. The tester comes really early in the morning. So I’m asleep, and because it’s a dorm, they can’t come up…he was downstairs at the first initial door, knocking. Obviously, I can’t hear him. Nobody can hear him. So he just calls it a missed test and that’s it,” the track and field athlete said. “I’ll be tested again later,” she thought. Why didn’t she dispute these instances?

Because she didn’t grasp how serious anti-doping was or the drug history in track. At the time, she was focused on graduating, her senior trip, and starting her master’s, not her career. Without an agent, she brushed it off, thinking nothing bad would happen. Looking back, she realizes she was young, felt invincible, and now sees it was naïve to think everything would just work out. How did she realize she was suspended?

Gabby’s suspension came in the mail. The athlete narrated, “So I get an email. They notify me. They say you have three missed tests. Oh, you’re going to be provisionally suspended.” Her reaction? “No, I don’t. And so I had to get a lawyer and everything.” Talking about how close the process was, she said that she had to go through each test one by one to prove she didn’t deserve the missed tests.

Thomas continued, “So I just did the first one. The first one was clearly the doping control officer’s fault because I was at the movie theater, and I came back to take the test, and she left. She broke the rules. And after that, we just left it at that. I was like, OK, that’s one missed test.” She did hire her lawyer for the other two because, as she said, lawyers are expensive.

“Phone tracking data and multiple witnesses will conclusively show that I was at the exact location I established in my whereabouts and that the doping control officer simply failed to locate me and failed to follow proper protocol,” stated Thomas while making a strong case for her defense.

Looking back now, as Gabby Thomas takes a strong step against doping

Gabby said in the video that the critics made her feel guilty until proven innocent. Once the first missed test was cleared, she moved on and was just glad to compete. At the time, she hadn’t even made a U.S. team, so no one really paid attention. People only bring it up now because she has a gold medal. Then she confessed, “I’ve never skipped a drug test. I have not missed a drug test in six years since I have left Cambridge and moved to Texas. I have not missed a single drug test. It doesn’t matter where I am, what city I’m in. If I’m out at a club, it doesn’t matter. I’ve never missed one.”

She said that now, with a better understanding of the sport’s history, she takes anti-doping very seriously. As of now, she has grown more vocal about it. While she does have critiques of the whereabouts system, she recognizes its purpose, protecting clean sport and athletes. “I definitely regret how I treated the whole whereabouts anti-doping process. And I learned a lot from that. I do think it’s really unfortunate that my mistakes have to be public, so you live and you learn.” 

The Olympian noted that now there are educational seminars and weekly email reminders about whereabouts, with much more support in place to keep athletes from going through what she experienced. 

And recently, Gabby Thomas, herself, took to her Instagram story to deliver a strong message on this same issue. “Doping coaches should be banned for life from coaching in the sport. Whether you were banned while competing as an athlete or caught distributing as a coach (for some, both). Idc idc idc.” The athletes training under these coaches weren’t safe from her radar either.

Targeting them, she wrote, “If you train under a coach who is known for doping (once, twice, or even three times for some) you are complicit. That’s my stance.”

All of this just goes on to show how she has evolved. From being someone who did not care about missed tests to being a voice against doping, Gabby Thomas has come a long way.