Most athletes train their entire lives for the Olympics, but most aren’t Masai Russell. Her path to a gold medal started in her senior year of high school when she competed in her first 100M hurdles.
Russell began her track journey at eight and quickly found success. By the time she was 10, she was invited to Youth Nationals and placed third in the 400M, and her track career was off to the races—no pun intended. “My main event for the longest time was the 400 until I got to high school,” says Russell. “I started with the 400M hurdles because it was the first hurdle event that piqued my interest naturally as a 400 runner.”
Before her senior year, she had become one of the top hurdlers in the country and had offers from almost every college with a track and field team. She decided to commit to the University Of Tennessee, but when her coach told her he would be coaching at Kentucky, she chose to follow him.
“The story of Kentucky is crazy because they weren’t even in my Top 5,” admitted Russell. “I didn’t do a visit, I didn’t do a tour, I was literally looking up the dorms on YouTube like 2-3 weeks before school started, but Kentucky ended up being the best school for me, as an individual, as an athlete, academically, everything.”
Russell got to Lexington and started making waves immediately. She would place first in a bunch of NCAA competitions and even break two collegiate records, but never won a 100M Hurdle outdoors, where she would rack up four second-place finishes. She qualified for the 2023 World Championships, where she would have a race she would never forget.
After falling during that fateful competition in Budapest, Russell made a bold claim. In what was arguably her lowest athletic moment on the biggest stage, she told the world that she would return to form. “Up until that race, I was having the best season of my life! I just continued to remember the positive things about the situation,” she tells ESSENCE. “I just knew that it was going to be something else on the other side of that adversity. I had to possibly go through that. I had to be more conscious and aware of my body. I had to be more focused on the way I train and my level of attention to detail.”
It was a minor setback for a major comeback. At the 2024 Olympic Trials, it all finally came together. There, Russell won the women’s 100-meter hurdles, with a time of 12.25, securing her a spot on the USA’s Olympic squad. That time is the best in the world this year, and the fourth fastest time ever recorded.
“I never gave up on myself,” Russell explains. “I always knew I could do that. It was all mental. I was having amazing practices, but my meets were not aligning with the way that I was looking in practice. And it finally happened, I had my best race at the best time possible.”
That success followed her to the Olympics in Paris. She was asked by sports journalist Maria Taylor if she would take home the gold before her race, and she confidently answered “yes,” inviting the pressure. During her Olympic final, she proved herself correct, winning a photo finish, only by one-hundredth of a second. At last, Russell finally won her gold medal on the grandest of all stages.
“It just meant the world to see my name come up number one as an Olympic gold medalist after missing out on NCAA titles and missing out on USA titles, and just always missing out, always being second, always coming so close but never being able to get the job done,” revealed Russell. “To finally achieve this win, on the biggest stage, it does not get any better. It meant the world. It just showed when you trust in God, you trust in your path, your journey, it’ll eventually come to pass.”
Along with winning the gold medal, Russell was one of the many track beauties that went viral during the Olympics for her face card. Her pictures and videos on social media garnered millions of views in a matter of weeks, boosting her Instagram following to over 450K. Russell didn’t mind the new attention at all.
“I’m just glad that the track women are getting their flowers because there are so many beautiful track women, and we are beauties and we’re beasts,” Russell says with a laugh. “We look good and we kill it on the track. We can wear long nails, long lashes, look put together, look good, and still get the job done and still make it happen. I feel like a lot of people think that you have to pick between one. I’m like, no, I’m gonna do my face. I’m gonna do what I need to do to look the way I wanna look when I’m competing.”
The Olympics created moments that Washington, DC-born athlete will never forget. Outside of winning the gold, she was able to meet new people and reconnect with old friends. She is close with fellow Olympians Suni Lee and Jordan Chiles, both of whom she got acquainted with due to endorsements and NIL deals they shared. But it was one specific person that she met that will forever be a core memory to her.
“Meeting LeBron James,” Russell reminisced during her time in Paris. “He was so big. Like, huge. And he was just super down to earth when I met him. We got to take a picture, and I was very happy about that. I was bragging to my brother and my boyfriend—I know they were jealous.”
With her first gold medal finally secured, Russell is now gearing up for her upcoming track season and some other career goals she wants to hit before she starts thinking about the Los Angeles Olympics in 2028. “I have a lot of other things to accomplish before I can start thinking about LA ‘28,” she says. “I mean, there’s records that I want to break, there’s world championships that I want to win. It would be a great sight to see my little sister with me competing here at home too. That would be one of the core memories of my life.”
Masai Russell is one of the faces of American track and field, and at only 24 years old, she will be for the foreseeable future. She showed everyone what it means to be the beauty, as well as the beast, and her Olympic Medal is golden proof of that.
