By: Yiling Sun
A 16-year-old student from Bullis High School attended the Olympic trials. That is extremely impressive, considering high school is pretty stressful, not to mention having to prepare for your driving test!
Quincy Wilson is 5 foot 9, pretty short compared to the other competitors in these trials. He’s also much younger than them, and probably more anxious, too. Nevertheless, he always does his best while racing, even if he knows the other competitors are better than him.
One of his competitors, Bryce Deadmon, is 6 foot 3 at 27 years old, which is pretty tall compared to Wilson. It’s scary to go against someone who is an entire head taller than you and has 11 more years of life experience. To make matters worse, another competitor who competes with Wilson on the other side of him is Vernon Norwood, a 6-foot 2 runner. Wilson better be prepared!
“Someone at 16 years old, they’re most likely to get scared when they go against big competitors,” Wilson said. “Vernon is 32 years old. I’m 16. I’m half his age. So, I’m just running for my life.”
At such a young age, Wilson set a record and broke it the very next day. His first record was running the 400 in 44.66 seconds. Super-fast! Then, the next day, he ran it in 44.59 seconds. And he finished third in his heat! You can only wonder how fast the other runners were. Because of his record breaking, he got to be in one of the nine spots that qualified for the finals.
“I’ve never been this happy a day in my life when it came to track,” Wilson said. “I’ve been working for this moment. That record that I broke two days ago…that’s 42 years of nobody being able to break that record. And I broke it twice in two days.”
The finals that Wilson attended was probably the biggest competition he’d ever been to. If he finishes in the top three spots, his life will get more exciting, as he enters more competitions in the future. He is very happy about entering the finals, and very excited to compete.
“I’m on the world’s biggest final coming up tomorrow,” he said. “At 16 years old! I’m like ecstatic right now.”
Wilson, as you already know, is a high school student at the Olympics. But what you don’t know yet is that he was born to a military family has moved to six different states. The military is strict, and pushes the entire army to do their best. Wilson’s family pushes him to do the same.
After the race, the day before the finals, Wilson explained what his coach said to him: “The first thing when I got off the track, my coach told me he’s extremely proud of me. He was telling me the things we’ve got to do to break down the race. He’s not caught up in the moment, and with that on my side, I think I have great things. I can’t wait for the final.”
Wilson is ready for his final race to begin. It’s a big event for a 16-year-old, but he doesn’t care. He’ll just do his best, no matter how much pressure he’s under.