Most athletes train their entire lives for the Olympics, but most aren’t Masai Russell. Her path to gold began in her senior 12 months of highschool when she competed within the 100-meter hurdles for the primary time.

Russell began running at age eight and quickly found success. When she was 10, she was invited to Youth Nationals and finished third within the 400m, and her track profession took off—no hard feelings. “For a long time, my main event was the 400m hurdles, up until high school,” Russell says. “I started in the 400m hurdles because it was the first hurdles event, which naturally piqued my interest as a 400m runner.”

By her senior 12 months of highschool, she had grow to be among the finest hurdlers within the country and had offers from nearly every college with a track team. She decided to commit to the University of Tennessee, but when her coach told her he could be training at Kentucky, she decided to follow him.

“Kentucky’s story is crazy because they weren’t even in my top five,” Russell admitted. “I didn’t visit, I didn’t take a tour, I literally looked up the dorms on YouTube like two or three weeks before school started, but Kentucky turned out to be the best school for me, as an individual, as an athlete, academically, every single way.”

Russell arrived in Lexington and immediately began making waves. She placed first in multiple NCAA meets and even broke two collegiate records, but she never won the 100-meter hurdles outdoors, where she finished second 4 times. She qualified for the 2023 World Championships, where she would compete in a race she would always remember.

After her crash in that fateful Budapest race, Russell made a daring statement. At what was arguably the bottom point of her athletic profession on the largest stage, she told the world that she would bounce back. “I was having the best season of my life up until that race! I just kept remembering the positives,” she tells ESSENCE. “I just knew that on the other side of that adversity, there was going to be something different. I had to get through it. I had to be more aware and mindful of my body. I had to focus more on the way I trained and the level of attention to detail.”

It was a minor setback before a significant comeback. At the 2024 Olympic trials, all of it finally got here together. There, Russell won the ladies’s 100-meter hurdles in 12.25, securing a spot on the U.S. Olympic team. That time is the fastest on the planet this 12 months and the fourth-fastest ever recorded.

“I never gave up,” Russell explains. “I always knew I could do it. It was all about my mentality. I had incredible training, but my races didn’t match how I looked in training. And in the end it worked, I had my best race in the best possible time.”

That success followed her to the Paris Olympics. Sports journalist Maria Taylor asked her if she would take home the gold before the race, and he or she confidently replied “yes,” scary the pressure. At the Olympic final, she proved her point, winning the photo finish by only one hundredth of a second. In the top, Russell won the gold medal on probably the most magnificent stage of all of them.

“It just meant the world to have my name in the top spot as an Olympic gold medalist after I failed to win the NCAA titles and failed to win the U.S. titles and just always coming up short, always second, always so close, but never quite getting the job done,” Russell revealed. “To finally get that win, on the biggest stage, there’s nothing better. It meant the world. It just showed me that when you trust God, you trust your path, your journey, it will eventually come true.”

In addition to winning the gold medal, Russell was one among several beauties who became popular throughout the Olympics due to her face card. Her social media photos and videos racked up hundreds of thousands of views in a matter of weeks, boosting her Instagram following to over 450,000. Russell wasn’t fazed by the brand new attention in any respect.

“I’m just happy that track athletes get flowers because there are so many beautiful women on the track and we’re the beauties and the beasts,” Russell says with fun. “We look good and we do great on the track. We can wear long nails, long eyelashes, look well-groomed, look good and still do our job and still do it. I feel like a lot of people think you have to choose one. I’m like, no, I’ll put on makeup. I’ll do what I need to do to look the way I want to when I compete.”

The Olympics created moments the Washington, D.C.-born athlete will always remember. In addition to winning gold, she was capable of meet latest people and reconnect with old friends. She is close with fellow Olympians Suni Lee and Jordan Chiles, who she met through endorsements and NIL agreements they signed together. But it was one person particularly she met who will eternally be her core memory.

“Meeting LeBron James,” Russell recalled during her time in Paris. “He was so big. Like… And he was just super down-to-earth when I met him. We took a picture and I was so happy about it. I was bragging to my brother and my boyfriend—I know they were jealous.”

With her first gold medal finally secured, Russell is now preparing for the upcoming track and field season and other skilled goals she wants to attain before she starts fascinated by the 2028 Olympics in Los Angeles. “I’ve got a lot of other things to do before I start thinking about LA ’28,” she says. “I mean, there are records I want to break, there are world championships I want to win. It would be great to see my little sister competing with me here at home. That would be one of the greatest memories of my life.”

Masai Russell is one among the faces of American track and field, and at just 24 years old, she can be for the foreseeable future. She has shown everyone what it means to be each the wonder and the beast, and her Olympic medal is the golden proof.