When the members of Team USA float down the Seine at the opening ceremony of the 2024 Paris Olympics, only California and Florida will have more athletes representing the red, white, and blue than Texas, which is sending more than forty Olympians and Paralympians to compete this summer. From global superstars like Simone Biles, the most decorated gymnast in the history of her sport, and Sha’Carri Richardson, the reigning fastest woman in the world, to a skeet shooter and a speed climber who are the very best in the world at what they do, this batch of Texan Olympians is as close as it gets to a sure bet to make fans in Texas and across the nation proud. Hailing from major metros such as Houston and Dallas and farther-flung locales like Texarkana and Laredo, these thirteen athletes represent the best of our sports-loving state.
Simone Biles
As the Lone Star State sends its best to represent Team USA, all eyes are on Biles, Texas’s one-woman gymnastics dynasty. Returning to competition in August 2023, at the U.S. Classic in Illinois, Biles made a comeback after her hiatus following the pandemic-postponed Tokyo Olympics. In Japan, she withdrew from several events to prioritize her mental health as she struggled with the twisties, a condition in which gymnasts lose awareness of where they are in the air. Hailing from Spring, just north of Houston, Biles trains at the World Champions Centre, which her family owns. In Paris, Biles is once again expected to add to her collection of 30 world-championship and Olympic medals, including 23 golds. Her journey back has been about not only reclaiming her position but also inspiring others, and in that regard, she has already stuck the landing.
Sha’Carri Richardson
Richardson is the fastest woman in the world heading into the Paris Games. She won the 100-meter race at the U.S. Olympic trials for track and field in June with a scorching time of 10.71 seconds. The 24-year-old from Dallas, whose specialties are the 100- and 200-meter sprints, began running when she was nine years old and started winning regional and state championships in middle school. The 2024 Summer Games represent a chance at a kind of redemption for Richardson. She qualified for the Tokyo Olympics in 2021, but she was disqualified from the competition after testing positive for THC, a banned substance for Olympic athletes, in a routine drug test. Her professional comeback was no cakewalk. Richardson fell short of qualifying for the 2022 World Athletics Championships, but she regained her footing in the 2023 season. At last year’s worlds, in Hungary, she won gold in the 100-meter race with a time of 10.65 seconds, the fifth fastest of all time in women’s track and field and less than two tenths of a second behind Florence Griffith Joyner’s world record of 10.49 seconds, which has stood since 1988. Richardson also earned a spot in Forbes’ 30 under 30 for 2024. One of Team USA’s most charismatic athletes, she will finally get her chance to perform on her sport’s biggest stage.
Jaedyn Shaw
Shaw grew up down the street from the National Soccer Hall of Fame, in her hometown of Frisco, where the North Texas product cheered on FC Dallas years before she played for the club’s youth academy or began making soccer history. The nineteen-year-old is now headed to Paris as the youngest member of the U.S. women’s national soccer team, two years after she turned pro and became the second-youngest player to compete in the National Women’s Soccer League. Shaw is the first USWNT player to score a goal in each of her first four starts—and she scored in her fifth start, too. She’s entering the Olympics tied as the national team’s top scorer in 2024, and she’s aiming to help U.S. women’s soccer restore its dominance on the world stage after the program’s disappointing performance in the 2023 Women’s World Cup.
Jennifer Lozano
Lozano is the first athlete from Laredo to participate in the Olympics in any sport. The 21-year-old boxer will be competing in the 50-kilogram (110-pound) weight class after winning silver at the 2023 Pan American Games, in Santiago. Lozano decided to take up boxing after being bullied during her elementary school years. She quickly realized that as the only girl at the boxing gym, she had to learn to fight by sparring with boys. As she began to master the sport, it started becoming harder and harder to find young men who were willing to get in the ring and spar with her. Since then, Lozano has earned podium spots at international competitions—such as the 2023 Gee Bee International Tournament, where she won bronze—and on national stages, such as the 2022 USA Boxing National Championships, where she was crowned the Elite Female champion. Lozano credits the women in her family as her main support system, and she proudly wears the nickname her grandmother gave her: “la Traviesa,” or “the Troublemaker.” Now that Laredo has its first-ever Olympian, Lozano hopes to come home to the Rio Grande as her city’s first gold medalist.
Simone Manuel
Manuel, a 27-year-old swimmer from Sugar Land, made history at the 2016 Summer Games, in Rio de Janeiro. Taking home two gold and two silver medals, she became the first Black woman to win an individual Olympic gold medal in swimming. But while she was training for the Tokyo Games, Manuel suddenly found herself plagued by weakness and fatigue. Diagnosed with debilitating overtraining syndrome, Manuel could barely handle light walks, much less the intensive workouts required to get ready for the Olympics. After a short time off, Manuel competed in Tokyo anyway, but after leaving with just one bronze medal, in the 4×100-meter relay, she wasn’t sure if she could ever compete again. She took months off to recover, and once she felt ready, she set her sights on Paris and worked her way back into elite condition. Her efforts paid off at the U.S. swimming trials in June, when Manuel won the 50-meter freestyle and secured her spot on Team USA. Last year Manuel launched the Simone Manuel Foundation to provide education and programs on water safety and swim readiness for BIPOC communities.
Chiaka Ogbogu and Avery Skinner
Ogbogu is used to victory on the volleyball court, but she doesn’t take it for granted. The middle blocker from the Dallas suburbs led Coppell High School to back-to-back state championships in 2011 and 2012 and continued on to a decorated college career at the University of Texas at Austin, from which she graduated with the most blocks in school history. Ogbogu helped the U.S. women’s team to its first-ever gold medal in volleyball at the Tokyo Olympics, but before the Paris rosters were announced, she told NBC 5 that she wouldn’t rest on knowing she’d been an Olympian already. Ogbogu returns to the Olympic team as a veteran leader, aiming to defend the squad’s title alongside newcomers like fellow Texan Skinner. The outside hitter from Katy, just west of Houston, comes from Texas sports royalty—her father, Brian Skinner, was a basketball star at Temple High School before playing for four years at Baylor (he’s still the Bears’ all-time career leader in blocked shots) and more than a decade in the NBA. In volleyball, Avery was an NCAA champion at Kentucky and a graduate student transfer at Baylor; she now plays professionally in Italy.
Joseph Brown
Brown, who grew up in the Metroplex and moved to Commerce after attending college at Texas A&M’s campus in the northeast Texas city, put his life on hold to chase his Olympic dream. After placing dead last in the Olympic trial preliminaries in 2021, the discus athlete landed the bronze medal at this year’s U.S. Olympic trials and secured a ticket to Paris with his 65.79-meter throw. The self-coached 28-year-old left his real estate career to focus full-time on training for the Paris Games. His hard work paid off, but getting to the Olympics was a team effort—Brown had few sponsorships to support him, so his wife carried the financial load for the two of them. Brown started track-and-field training in high school but never even made it to the state championships. He focused on discus at Texas A&M–Commerce and in 2019 won the NCAA Division II national championship. In Paris, Brown hopes to show younger athletes that it doesn’t matter if you are a late bloomer as long as you dedicate yourself to your sport.
Jourdan Delacruz
Delacruz, a 26-year-old weight lifter from the northeastern Dallas suburb of Wylie, has a chance to pull off a remarkable Olympic comeback in Paris. At the Tokyo Games, in 2021, Delacruz, who competes in the 49-kilogram (about 108 pounds) weight class, “bombed out,” failing to complete a successful shoulder lift during clean and jerks at 108 kilograms (about 238 pounds). Since then, she has refocused her training, managed to secure her first senior worlds bronze medal, and won her third gold medal at the Pan American Weightlifting Championships. Heading into these Olympics, Delacruz is ranked fourth in the world in her weight class, with a strong chance to earn a medal this time around.
Jarrion Lawson
Lawson, from Texarkana, is the first Olympian to come out of his hometown, in the state’s northeast corner. In Paris, the thirty-year-old long jumper and sprinter will be competing in his second Olympics. At the 2016 NCAA outdoor championships, the former Arkansas Razorback won gold in the long jump and the 100-meter and 200-meter races, a feat only Jesse Owens had accomplished until then. Lawson competed in the long jump at the 2016 Olympics, where he placed fourth overall. He missed the Tokyo Games with an injury and now has a chance to make up for the lost Olympic cycle in Paris.
Vincent Hancock
Hancock became a skeet shooting world champion at sixteen and was also the first man to win two consecutive Olympic skeet shooting golds in the same event, which he did in 2008 and 2012. After a fifteenth-place finish at the 2016 Olympics, he reclaimed gold in Tokyo and has a chance to keep winning, with Michael Phelps–esque longevity, this summer in France. And Hancock, who is 35, doesn’t even plan to retire until after the 2028 Los Angeles Olympics. The Georgia native lives with his family in the Fort Worth area, where last year he opened a training complex called Northlake Shooting Sports. There, he helps train hundreds of high school athletes in the hope of expanding access to and interest in shooting sports. He also uses the facility to coach fellow Texan Olympians Austen Smith and Conner Prince, both of whom will compete alongside Hancock in Paris. If he can win another gold medal this year, Hancock will become just the sixth athlete to win four Olympic gold medals in the same individual event.
Ryann Phillips
Hailing from Gail, a town about seventy miles south of Lubbock, in West Texas, Phillips is a twenty-year-old first-time Olympian and one of the nation’s top trapshooters. She started trapshooting in 4-H, after her mother discouraged her from showing livestock when Phillips was in the third grade. Ranked eighteenth in the world and first in the U.S. in women’s trap, Phillips placed third overall and first in the junior division at the first-round Olympic trials last May. Since there is no trapshooting team at Texas A&M–Corpus Christi, where Phillips is pursuing a communication studies degree, she travels two hundred miles to Kerrville on weekends to train. Phillips’s dedication has propelled her to the world stage, where she hopes to bring a medal home for Team USA and Aggieland alike.
Sam Watson
Watson, an eighteen-year-old speed climber from the DFW suburb of Southlake, broke the world record for speed climbing twice at the IFSC (International Federation of Sport Climbing) World Cup in April. In the sport, in which climbers race up a fifteen-meter wall, Watson beat the existing world record of 4.90 seconds in his first run of the day, clocking in at 4.85 seconds—then, in his second run, he beat the record he’d just set with a time of 4.79 seconds. Watson is looking to stay on top at the 2024 Olympics, and he is considered the gold medal favorite in men’s speed climbing. Just don’t look away from the TV screen when he starts his run up the wall, because it won’t take him long to reach the top.
