It was almost three years ago to the day.
Quincy Wilson, age 13, was gripped. The Tokyo Olympics were on his TV and he couldn’t peel his eyes off the action.
His mom, Monique, sat and watched with him at their home in Maryland.
“I want to be there one day,” Wilson told his mom. “I want to run for Team USA.”
“Keep working, Quincy,” Monique told her son. “Let’s count the years, you could possibly be there in 2028.”
Monique’s prediction felt reasonable during that summer of 2021. Wilson would be just 20 years old at the 2028 Olympics in Los Angeles, still ahead of his athletic prime but within the Olympic window for a track star.
Just three years have passed since that moment on the couch. Wilson is now 16, and he’s already an Olympian. The wunderkind is the youngest male track athlete ever to make the U.S. Olympic team.
“[My mom] didn’t expect things to come so fast, and I didn’t even expect things to come so fast,” Wilson told NBC Olympics. “I’ve always watched the Olympics. It’s been my dream since I started running track."
“And so, when I put on this Team USA uniform, I’ll put it on with pride. Because at 16 years old, it’s just unheard of.”
It is unheard of. Wilson’s Olympic selection smashes an age record set generations ago by distance runner Jim Ryun, who was 17 years old at the 1964 Tokyo Games.
Chasing the dream
Quincy Wilson might be young — the iPhone predates him by a full year — but he’s no track novice.
By his 15th birthday, he was already a five-time Junior Olympic champion. Competing for the Bullis School in Potomac, Maryland — which also produced this year’s women's 100m hurdles U.S. Trials champion Masai Russell — Wilson has worked himself into a 400m and 500m phenom.
This January, he ran the second-fastest 500m race in U.S. high school history. He one-upped himself in March and broke an under-18 world record in the indoor 400m.
In June, the one-upping reached its zenith as the boyish Wilson — dwarfed by his grown-man opponents — introduced himself to the world at the U.S. Olympic Track and Field Team Trials.
Wilson was happy to be at Trials in Eugene, Oregon, but he wasn’t just happy to be there. He was there to make the U.S. Olympic team, just like Noah Lyles, Grant Holloway and Quincy Hall, all of whom texted Wilson words of advice the week before.
Wilson showed up at the American track and field mecca, “Track Town, USA”, with a crystal-clear mindset: It’s just running.
“I told myself, ‘It’s just a normal race,’” Wilson said. “It’s anybody’s race. Everybody puts on their shoes the same way. Everybody starts the same way. Everybody gets in the blocks the same way."
“At the end of the day, you just have to go run your best. So, I just ran my best and my outcomes were my outcomes.”
Wilson’s outcomes made history.
In the men’s 400m first round, Wilson blazed to the finish line in just 44.66 seconds. That broke an under-18 world record that had stood for 42 years.
It stood for just 50 more hours. In the semifinal, Wilson trimmed 0.7 seconds off that time to book his spot in the final, placing the kid from Maryland within arm’s reach of a shockingly early Olympic berth. He just needed to finish in the top three at the final, where he’d line up against Olympic gold medalists like 27-year-old Bryce Deadmon, 26-year old Michael Norman and 32-year-old Vernon Norwood, who is twice Wilson’s age.
The massive stakes could have rattled Wilson. “I didn’t really have too many nerves, to be honest.”
Guess not. Wilson remained cool and ran a 44.94-second race in the final, placing sixth. While that wasn’t quite enough to make the 400m Olympic team, the top-six finish made Wilson eligible to earn an Olympic team selection to the men’s relay pool.
Realizing the dream
Six days later and 3,000 miles from where he’d raced into the history books, Wilson was back at home in Maryland. It was Sunday night.
Like almost every 16-year-old in the world, Wilson was still not an Olympian. But he knew he was close. He was scheduled to receive a call from the USA Track & Field higher-ups between 9:00 and 10:00 p.m.
At 10:00, Wilson was still waiting — no call. At 11:00, with bedtime approaching, still no call.
“I was like, ‘Well, I guess I didn’t make it,’” Wilson remembered.
At 11:30, Wilson’s agent called. He picked up. From the other line, he could hear the iconic drumbeats of the Olympic theme song.
Quincy Wilson was an Olympian. He sprinted into his mom’s room, jumping up and down, and gave her a big hug. His sister, Kadence, heard the commotion and ran inside to join the hug. So did his dad, Roy. It didn’t take long for a Wilson family mosh pit to develop. They were all bound for Paris.
“In that moment, you can’t really believe it,” Wilson recalled. “You don’t understand what you just did.“
This has been my dream since I was a little kid. But I still am a little kid.
Wilson’s mind could hardly process what was happening to him. So, he played some video games.
He stayed up until 3:00 a.m. practicing his other craft — he’s an expert-level Call of Duty and NBA 2K player with a following on Twitch — and feeling grateful. That’s when his new reality settled in.
“It just randomly hit me,” Wilson said. “I’m an Olympian. It’s just amazing to be able to say that.”
Wilson’s selection to the U.S. Olympic men’s relay pool was set in stone, and it seemed like everyone noticed. Magic Johnson invited Wilson and his family to watch a Washington Commanders game with him in the owner’s suite.
Deion Sanders tweeted about him. Wilson was recently invited to a glitzy seafood dinner in Baltimore, where he dined on crab with local stars from the Ravens and Orioles.
He just secured his first passport and is ready to run, of course. But first, the honor-roll student is eager to put his French chops to the test. Wilson has been taking French for three years now and says he’s “learned a lot.”
“I want to see if I can actually speak to a person in French and be able to translate it back to my parents,” Wilson said. “That’s something I’ve been thinking about. Will I be able to understand someone?”
He just hopes his conversation partner doesn’t use slang. He’s not up-to-speed on that quite yet.
Perhaps a few weeks in Paris will help.
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UPDATE: On July 19, Wilson set a new under-18 400m world record for the third time in four weeks, posting a time of 44.20 seconds at the Holloway Pro Classic on Friday at the University of Florida.