The spotlight has been on Quincy Wilson since a race that improbably lasted 44.66 seconds.
Last month, the 16-year-old ran 400 meters at Hayward Field in Eugene, Oregon — the mecca of track and field — faster than anyone under the age of 18, breaking a 42-year-old world record. A day later, Wilson finished in 44.59 seconds, a second landmark time in as many days. Friday night in Gainesville, Florida, he did it again, this time in 44.2. That’s the sixth-fastest time in the 400 this year, regardless of age.
Wilson was showered with encouragement from rap icon Snoop Dogg. He received an invitation to Magic Johnson’s owner’s suite for a Washington Commanders game. Colorado football coach and NFL legend Deion Sanders gave him a shoutout on social media. And a flock of players from Wilson’s favorite football team, the Ravens, reached out.
He was a star.
The likes of Ray Lewis, Torrey Smith and Zay Flowers wanted to congratulate Wilson, a rising junior at Bullis School in Potomac who is the youngest male athlete on the U.S. Olympic track and field team. The 5-foot-9 wunderkind with frivolous charm was suddenly thrust into the zeitgeist when, on June 30, he was one of six runners selected for Team USA’s 4×400 relay pool for the Paris Games. He narrowly missed qualifying for the 400 despite reaching the finals at the U.S. Olympic trials.
Olympic gold medalist Tommie Smith, best known for his raised fist protest at the 1968 Games, tuned in to each of Wilson’s trial races. Smith can attest to Wilson’s speed. At 22, he ran the 400 in 44.5 seconds. That was a world record in 1967.
“If he continues,” Smith told The Baltimore Sun, “he’ll be one of the greatest athletes in the 400. … My goodness, he’s poised.”
‘He made good on his promise’
Joe Lee knows how historic the record performance was. The 11-year coach at Bullis is well aware of the impact that race had on both Wilson and the sport — the eight-day trials averaged 4.5 million viewers across NBC and Peacock, a 38% increase from the 2021 event. But Lee has another favorite race.
It’s the prerequisite Wilson needed to endure a year earlier inside the same world-renowned stadium on the University of Oregon campus.
This one was for U20 Nationals in June 2023. Wilson made an uncharacteristic, self-inflicted mistake that resulted in a fourth-place finish in the 400. The expression of distaste was so clear in his face slogging across the finish line.
He walked off the track, pushing aside a few tears from his baby-faced cheeks and approached his coach. Wilson told Lee he’d be back for vengeance.
“I told myself when you’re at that high level of competing, it’s gonna take everything,” Wilson said. “Not just skill, not just talent. It’s gonna take a lot of understanding of the 400. It’s gonna take a lot of reps and improving mechanics.”
“One year later, almost to the day,” Lee said, “he made good on his promise.”
Wilson has always been fast — as if there were never questions about his natural speed.
His first organized races were for a local youth track team in Severna Park. Wilson obliterated his peers, often by 50 or 100 meters. In the 400, one lap around a standard outdoor track, he’d finish 150 and sometimes 200 meters ahead of the pack. Back then, the formula was simple. His mom, Monique, used to say “When you get to the goal post, just take off.”
That worked until he was 11 or 12 years old.
“[It was] probably that moment,” Wilson said of when he first realized he was fast. “I also played football. I was usually the fastest on my team. We’d go play different teams in the area and when they would need me on third down I would get the ball. They’d be like, ‘Go get us a first down! Go get us a touchdown!’”
Wilson was in eighth grade when Monique first introduced herself to Lee. She sauntered onto the Bullis track and walked right up to the man who turned the program into a powerhouse. Lee inherited a perennial last-place finisher. “No one knew about us,” he said. What he built — now behind a parade of national standouts — enticed the Wilson family.
“Yeah, right,” Lee thought. “Are you joking?” The Wilsons lived in Chesapeake, Virginia, at the time, a nearly four-hour drive away. Lee wondered if they planned to hire a helicopter service for school each day.
“No, no,” Monique said. “We’re gonna move up there. We’re gonna relocate and we want him to go to Bullis and train under you.”
Lee was thrilled. He spent the summer getting to know his incoming freshman. Wilson was reserved at first, as any young teenager might be, but the two bonded over a similarly clowning sense of humor and a determined thirst for the minute details of the sport.
The race that ignited a fresh motivation in Wilson heading to high school came in August 2022 at the AAU Junior Olympic Games in Greensboro, North Carolina. Wilson’s 47.59-second time in the 400 bested an under-14 national record that had stood for three decades.
Another of Lee’s favorite jaw-droppers came during Wilson’s freshman year during a 4×400 relay semifinal race at the famed Penn Relays in Philadelphia. Lee’s original plan was to have Wilson cruise the final leg, conserving his best for the final. Then their lead runner got knocked down and fumbled the baton.
“When [Wilson] got the stick, we were in seventh place,” Lee said. “He went from seventh to first and split 44.3. And then came back later that day and split 44.6.”
Wilson chipped away at passing each runner ahead of him like an ace pitcher hunting a no-hitter. A masterful run that would’ve stirred Snoop Dogg had he been there.
Getting the call
Wilson shows no ego. While it might have been easy for him to arrive at Bullis’ 102-acre campus with that eighth grade record in his back pocket and feel as though he had it all figured out, Lee marveled at how coachable and engaged Wilson was in the process.
“I’m very much a stickler for understanding, not what you’re doing but why you’re doing it,” Lee said. “Quincy bought into all that. He wants all the information and he wants you to give it to him straight. He doesn’t want you to sugarcoat it.
“He wants me to talk to him as if we’re in a master’s-level course.”
Earlier this month the two were talking about shaving hundredths of a second. How? By addressing his interior pelvic turn and its compounding influence slowing down Wilson’s stride frequency.
Wilson has always taken a detailed approach, methodical in his run from the time he could simply take off from the goalpost. But Lee instilled a more precise understanding of the way his body flies around the oval track, which has elevated him from an impressive middle-distance racer to an unprecedented Olympian.
He went from 47.5 as an eighth grader to 45.8 as a freshman. This past year year of advanced study and a chip on his shoulder from a blunder in Eugene helped him shave another full second for the race that had him fielding all sorts of famous calls, texts and congratulatory messages, including praise from fellow American Noah Lyles, currently the fastest man in the world.
The call determining Wilson’s Olympic fate was scheduled to come June 30. Lee was told to expect it sometime around 6 p.m. “They said West Coast. I’m like ‘Dang, that means 9 p.m.’”
Nine o’clock came and went. It was 10:30 p.m. and still nothing. “I’m thinking, we’re playing with house money.” Nobody expected Wilson to make this Olympics purely because of his age. He had the talent to get there but it certainly wasn’t an expectation nor his last shot.
At about 10:45, the phone rang. It was the Team USA track coaching staff. Lee thanked them and hung up. He took a deep breath and immediately dialed the Wilsons. Lee interjected his retelling to share that he and Wilson like to joke with one another.
“I’ve got some unfortunate news,” Lee said. After a pause that felt like an eternity, he continued, “I’m sorry to say … you are going to have to go to Paris and represent Team USA.”
Wilson screamed. He ran around the house uncontrollably. The overwhelming emotions kept him awake until 5 a.m.
“There have been some greats that have put on the uniform for Team USA over the years,” Lee said. “People like Jesse Owens, Bob Beaman, Carl Lewis, Michael Johnson and Noah Lyles. It’s beyond humbling that he’s in those conversations. But as big as they were, they weren’t where they were at his age.”