Brittany Brown’s journey to her first Olympic games and medal—bronze in the women’s 200-meter—has been quiet: She didn’t speak much to the press during her first couple years out of college, when she was pursuing a pro career without a sponsorship, and even after taking home the silver medal at the 2019 World Athletics Championships for the 200-meter (and signing with Adidas and later Nike), Brown kept a relatively low profile.
But 2024 has been, undeniably, Brown’s breakout year. After surprising track-and-field fans with a first-place finish in the 200-meter at the 2024 Oslo Diamond League (ahead of established champions like Shericka Jackson) in May, she went on to run her personal best time of 21.90 for the same event in June at the US Olympic Trials, finishing second only to track phenom Gabby Thomas and locking down her spot at the Paris Games.
Now that Brown has made it to the podium, she’s clearly overdue for some fanfare. As the announcer for the Olympic Trials Mike Jay told the Des Moines Register about Brown: “She doesn’t seek the limelight—but deserves the limelight.” Read on to learn more about the rising track star, and join us in getting loud about Brown.
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1. She had an unlikely road to success in the sport.
Brown’s path to Olympic sprinter hasn’t been a straight line: As she wrote on X after her remarkable showing at the Trials, she never won a track title, didn’t go to a “big track school,” didn’t win an NCAA title, and wasn’t signed out of college to a shoe company. By then, she’d certainly distinguished herself as good, but it wasn’t totally obvious how great she’d become. “No one saw all this at a young age,” she told Citius Mag. “I just worked my ass off to get here. I worked hard to get here despite a lot of things I dealt with.”
2. Brown just made University of Iowa history.
In taking home the bronze for the women’s 200-meter on Tuesday, Brown became the first woman from the University of Iowa to win an individual Olympic medal in track and field, according to a post on X from Iowa Athletics. Much like the medal itself, this achievement wasn’t exactly a foregone conclusion: Yes, Brown was an 11-time all-American and set school records in both the 100- and 200-meters, but she never landed a NCAA title, nor did she even have intentions of running professionally during her first couple years of school.
It wasn’t until her junior year that Brown got a glimpse of what could be: She had the chance to race some pros and beat them, as she shared on the platform Untold Athletes. “I was like, ‘Okay, I’m low-key good,’” she wrote in January of this year. Even then, though, it felt like a long shot for her to make it as a pro; in fact, Brown would come in dead-last in her first professional overseas meet, in Switzerland, a few years later—almost impossible to believe now. These uncertain beginnings make it even more impressive to see how she’s found her stride.
3. She has endometriosis and is an advocate for other women with the condition.
For the first time this year, Brown also shared that she has endometriosis, a condition in which uterine-like tissue grows outside the uterus. When that tissue thickens and attempts to shed like the uterine lining with each period, it can cause severe pelvic pain, excessive bleeding, and GI symptoms like diarrhea and nausea—all of which Brown has said that she’s experienced, sometimes even in the middle of a track meet. “At times it feels like this body I’ve been given is literally trying to attack me,” she wrote on Instagram, “but at the same time I love my body because it figures out a way to show up.”