Tory Bowie, the sprinter who won three medals at the 2016 Olympics in Rio de Janeiro and won the world championships in the 100m the following year with a stunning comeback, has died. She was 32 years old.
Her death was confirmed in a statement released Wednesday by USA Track and Field, which did not provide further details.
The Orange County Sheriff’s Office, Florida, said in a statement that its personnel went to a home in Winter Garden, Florida, on Tuesday to check on a woman in her 30s who had not been seen or heard from for several days. They entered the house and found the body of a woman, whom they tentatively identified as Frentorish “Tori” Bowie. “There were no indications of foul play,” the statement said.
At the 2016 Olympics, Bowie won a gold medal in the 4×100 relay, anchoring a team with Tiana Bartoletta, Alison Felix, and English Gardner who finished in a time of 41.01. She won a silver in the 100-meter dash and a bronze in the 200-meter dash.
The US relay team advanced to the Olympics final only after winning an appeal from a ruling that would have disqualified them for dropping a baton in a qualifying race. The American runners were allowed to rerun after Olympic officials determined that a Brazilian runner interfered with Felix as she was about to hand the baton to Gardner.
To reach the finals, the American team had to run alone on the track in a time trial and do so faster than the slowest qualifier for the finals. They did, setting the fastest time of the day, and went on to win the gold medal with Bowie as announcer.
The world championship title came to Bowie the following year in London, in the dramatic 100 metres. Marie Jose Ta Lou The Ivory Coast has spread out at the top and looks ahead of the rest of the group. But Bowie accelerated, Caught up in Ta Lo and stomped across the finish line in front of her before she fell to the ground.
“I think it was more of a trickle and, you know, he just kind of lost control of it,” Bowie told a BBC interview after her win, adding that the fall came from “just wanting to win so badly”.
She won another gold medal at that World Championships, in the 4×100 relay.
she told her sister, Tamara Bowie, who also ran track Vogue magazine magazine in 2018, “Tori has second gear that no one else has.”
French Boy was born on August 27, 1990. She was raised by her grandmother in Sand Hill, Miss., a small town outside of Jackson. She graduated in 2008 from Pisgah High School in Brandon, also in the Jackson area, where she played basketball, ran track, and competed in the long jump.
Bowie attended the University of Southern Mississippi, where she became the national long jump champion in 2011. She graduated in 2012 with a degree in Interdisciplinary Studies.
She finished fourth in the long jump at the World Championships in Doha, Qatar, in 2019. She has also worked as a model.
Among the survivors is her sister.
Kirsten Noyes contributed research.
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