Quincy Wilson, an Olympic gold medalist and straight-A student, is ‘more focused in the classroom than on the track’

Quincy Wilson’s life is moving quickly, his days passing in a busy blur. But as one of the world’s fastest teenagers, he’s used to keeping up with this kind of whirlwind pace.

It has been six months since Wilson won relay gold as a 16-year-old at the Paris Olympics, becoming the youngest male track and field champion in history. Already that feels like a distant memory, his foot firmly on the gas as he returns to indoor racing.

“I’m just getting back to work,” Wilson tells CNN Sport. “No gold medal, none of that in mind. When I’m practicing, I’m worrying about my future goals, nothing in the past. I can’t go and change what I’ve done.”

It’s easy to forget, despite his near-constant boyish grin, that Wilson is still a high school student. He won’t graduate from Maryland’s Bullis School until next year, and in the meantime continues to pursue his sporting ambitions alongside lessons and homework.

That means waking up at 5 a.m. each day and getting on the bus around 6:15 to arrive at school for 7:30. “Do I like early mornings? No,” says Wilson, “but I have to do what I gotta do.”

A full day of school follows, after which he has practice at the track from 3 to 6 p.m. Then it’s back home for more schoolwork and preparing for any tests he might have the next day – hardly a typical schedule for someone who emerged as one of the fastest 400-meter runners in the world last year.

But schoolwork, Wilson stresses, is of upmost importance to him.

“I think I’m more focused in the classroom than I am on the track, and that can tell you a lot,” he explains. “My grade average is an A average throughout this semester already. All my life, I’ve all had an A average, I think, so nothing has changed.”

He lists anatomy and physiology, pre-calculus and photography as some of his favorite classes, and speaks enthusiastically about an ongoing engineering project looking at how buildings are reinforced to withstand different types of earthquakes.

“I’m not taking classes just like PE,” Wilson adds with a smile. “I’m taking every single class an 11th grader would and some.”

He’s yet to make a decision on his first-choice college, but hopes to end up somewhere with “great athletics, great academics, great teammates, great support – just great staff all around” when the time arrives.

For now, Wilson’s attentions are on the indoor season, using his weekends to travel to meets on the East Coast. He broke his own indoor high school 400-meter record in Boston last weekend, clocking 45.66 seconds around two laps of the track, and will race in the 600-meters at the Millrose Games in New York City on Saturday.

With one record already to his name this year, Wilson could target another – Will Sumner’s high school 600m record of 1:15.58 – at the Millrose Games, though it would involve lowering his time from last year by almost two seconds.

“I’m just going out there to try to run my best, and if I see 1:15 on the clock, I’ll be super ecstatic,” he says. “But right now, my goal is just to get around the track and try to stay with everyone in the race.”

Given his young age and incredible promise – plus his recently acquired status as an Olympic gold medalist – there will undoubtedly be heightened attention on Wilson’s performances this season.

He shot to fame at last year’s US Olympic Trials, twice breaking the under-18 400m world record before finishing sixth in the final. That wasn’t enough for an individual spot on the team, but it did earn Wilson a place in the relay pool, making him the youngest US man to compete in track and field at the Olympics.

In Paris, weeks after setting another under-18 record of 44.2 seconds, he was far from his best, coming in seventh at the end of the first leg in the 4x400m relay heats. But the US team of Wilson, Vernon Norwood, Bryce Deadmon and Christopher Bailey still secured a spot in the final and went on to win gold as hurdles specialist Rai Benjamin swapped into the team.

Running in the heats was still enough to earn Wilson a medal, and he recently revealed that he had sustained a hamstring injury soon after earning a spot on the Olympic team. Despite that, and despite running considerably slower than at the trials, he describes the Olympic experience as a “dream come true” and “the best thing that could ever happen to me.”

The rest of Wilson’s summer was taken up by engagements and invites, still rolling in thick and fast today. He met Jay-Z, visited colleges, and went to baseball and football games around Baltimore; a huge Ravens fan, he spent time at the team’s facility, had his photo taken with quarterback Lamar Jackson, and was gifted cleats by wide receiver Zay Flowers.

In another life, Wilson might have contemplated a career in the NFL. He was the leading scorer on his high school team during freshman year and only made the decision to focus solely on track at the age of 15.

“Man, I miss football so much,” he says. “If I could go play football right now, I would. If they invited me to the Super Bowl over the biggest track meet, I don’t know which one I would choose, honestly.

“I grew up playing football and running track. I knew my end goals for track, what I wanted to do, and it’s hard – every day I think about it, because I just want to go back and play (football) right now. I just want to go outside and throw a football around, but I know I’ve done a lot of great things in track.”

As for the Ravens, Wilson says that he “was almost in tears” when tight end Mark Andrew dropped a game-tying two-point conversion in the team’s recent divisional round defeat.

“We’re inching closer and closer to the Super Bowl,” he adds. “You guys are gonna see us in a couple years. I’m telling you.”

Unbelievably, Wilson was only four years old during the Ravens’ last Super Bowl appearance in 2012. He has since grown into one of the most exciting young athletes of his generation, already racing against – and beating – far more experienced opponents.

In that time, he has remained unfazed by his fast-tracked rise to senior racing. The stakes might be higher, the competition fiercer, but the basic act of completing a single lap of a running track as fast as possible is still the same.

“They put the spikes on the same way I do,” says Wilson. “We line up the same way I do, we get in the blocks the same way. So I feel like it’s nothing different. You may be 6’10”, and I may be 4’11”, but at the end of the day, we’ve got to run and we’ve got to run together.

“You’ll see a lot of 16-year-olds like, ‘Yeah, I’m going to just let you win.’ But for me, I’m not letting anybody win. I’m ready to fight to the line as well.”

At 5’9”, Wilson is shorter and physically less developed than most of his rivals. Yet more striking is the way in which he runs. Head tilted back, arms flapping at the side of his body – it’s hardly conventional form for a sprinter.

But being unconventional is also part of Wilson’s modus operandi, central to the dichotomy between his life as an elite runner and high school student. He’s part Olympian and gold medalist, part schoolboy figuring out when to do his homework and when to get his driver’s license.

Right now, Wilson has placed things like getting his license on hold. However, he has spent a lot of the past 12 months remembering that “you’re a kid and a 16-year-old who’s going to school and having fun and doing a lot of cool things that a teenager’s doing.”

In the world of track and field and beyond, not many Olympic gold medalists have been able to say that.

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