By Jim McGrath | jmcgrath@alextimes.com
“You should race Noah Lyles.”
The brazen comment, delivered by one of the members of George Washington Middle School’s Girls on the Run group, was directed toward the guest presenter who was visiting the 25 or so students gathered in the school’s library.
Yet their visitor was no ordinary speaker. Thea LaFond-Gadson, the reigning Olympic champion in the women’s triple jump, visited the contingent the afternoon of Oct. 22 with a simple, but inspiring message: “Stay active, believe in yourselves and keep the ‘Olympic spirit’ with you every day.”
LaFond-Gadson knows about all three. Although she competes for the tiny Caribbean island of Dominica, her formative years were spent as a student and athlete in Maryland, first at John F. Kennedy High School in Silver Spring and then with the University of Maryland. Eventually, she would return to Kennedy, but this time as a special education teacher.
It was during her teaching career that she began to live the message she now preaches. LaFond-Gadson had represented Dominica as a triple jumper at the 2016 Olympics, but her performance was far below the standard for which she is now known. In fact, she placed 37th of 37 jumpers with a best jump of 12.82 meters, far from her then-best of 13.60.
LaFond-Gadson returned to Maryland to begin her teaching career, but the urge to compete was still burning. So she kept doing the work for the next six years on the side.
“I’d get up early and be at the gym by 5:30 every morning to lift and work out,” LaFond-Gadson recalled. “Then I would go to school and teach all day, and when school ended, I went straight to the track to do my running workout.”
It was a routine that kept her busy for six days every week. However, the other facets of her life were blossoming. A friend introduced her to Aaron Gadson, a former collegiate jumper for Cornell University, who had moved to Maryland to take over as the head track coach of Churchill High in Potomac. Gadson became her coach, and eventually, husband in 2022.
Her upward trajectory continued.
A new personal-best jump of 13.92 meters was good enough to put LaFond-Gadson on the medal stand with a third place finish at the Commonwealth Games in 2018. She would qualify for the 2020 Tokyo Olympics, which were delayed by a year because of the COVID-19 pandemic.
When the Games took place in 2021, LaFond-Gadson qualified for the finals and placed 12th overall. In 2022, she eclipsed the 14.50 meter barrier in the triple jump and won her first major championship at the NACAC Championships in Freeport, Bahamas.
In March of 2024, LaFond-Gadson reached a milestone, claiming her first world championship at the World Indoor Championships in Glasgow, Scotland, while jumping 15.01 meters, the equivalent of 49 feet and three inches. But, as she told the group of fledgling track stars at GWMS, something was wrong.
“My knee felt like someone had hit it with a baseball bat,” LaFond-Gadson remembered. “I tried to ignore it, but the pain was so great.”
Two months later, she went for a scan on the afflicted knee. To hear LaFond-Gadson retell the story is painful.
“The doctors told me that the injury was at the base of the femur [thigh bone]. It was severely bruised,” she said.
There was an important choice to make.
“I was told not to do sports for the next three months. That was on May 3,” LaFond-Gadson said.
There was one problem. The Paris Olympics qualifying meet was scheduled for Aug. 3, exactly three months from the diagnosis.
Her choice? “Either I could continue competing and risk making the knee worse or rest. It was the biggest risk of my life,” she admitted, before deciding, “There was no way I was going to miss the Olympics.”
LaFond-Gadson powered through the pain.
“[The doctors] told me that women can handle more pain [as opposed to men],” she said.
Even with the nudge of confidence from her medical professionals, she battled daily.
“I was walking around with a cane, and riding as often as I could. Even at the Olympic Village [in Paris], they had golf carts driving athletes from one place to another. I made friends with all the drivers,” Lafond-Gadson said with a laugh. “They saw me many times every day.”
In spite of barely being able to walk, LaFond-Gadson took to the Stade de France track and won the triple jump, breaking her own national record with a hop, skip and jump of 15.02 meters. In the process, she became the first medal winner in her country’s history, and immediately turned into a national hero.
“They tell me that my gold medal made for the most social media searches ever for Dominica,” LaFond-Gadson said, without a trace of boastfulness. “It was wonderful, since Julien Alfred from Saint Lucia won the women’s 100 meters that same night.”
The hunch about her knee pain proved to be true.
“Two weeks after the Olympics, the surgeon cut open my knee and the cartilage literally fell out,” she recounted.
LaFond-Gadson’s life has also changed since her gold medal performance.
“To be honest, I’m better off financially,” she told the Times after the presentation. “And interest in our sport has skyrocketed.”
The jumper is now sponsored by Adidas, the same company that represents Lyles, the gold medal sprinter from Alexandria’s West End. With regard to the comment about racing him, she answered, “The 100 [meters] is his job. Triple jumping is my job.”
And then there is the gold medal, which was draped around her neck, to the delight of the audience members.
“It’s only about 8% gold,” LaFond-Gadson told the group, which included club sponsors Reynaldo Decerega and Katrina Schwien and track coach Kendia Thomas. “The rest is metal and it’s really heavy. I have seen people wearing their medal, jumping up and down and the medal breaks off [of the lanyard] because of the weight. Another time, I saw someone chip their tooth because the medal hit her in the face.”
LaFond-Gadson went on to add that a piece of metal from Paris’s Eiffel Tower, gathered during routine maintenance, was used as part of each Olympic medal.
The jumper’s next stop is Monaco.
“I have been traveling for the past five weeks,” she replied to a question about her duties with Adidas. For the Girls on the Run at George Washington Middle School, she left behind an afternoon full of Olympic memories and life lessons.
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