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Home > Olympics > Bronze Medalists > Debi Thomas
Debi Thomas
The Olympic Games or Olympics is an international multi-sport event taking place every four years which comprises of summer and winter games. Though the first ancient games were held in 776 B.C, the modern games started from 1896. The unity of the 5 continents is shown on the Olympic flag by five colorful intertwined rings of red, blue, green, yellow, and black, created by Baron Pierre de Coubertin to represent at least one color of the participating country’s national flag.
Debi Thomas was born on March 25, 1967. She was a figure skater and the first African American to win a medal at the Winter Olympics. She won the bronze medal at the 1988 Winter Olympics in Calgary in the year that Katarina Witt won the gold; the competition was dubbed the Battle of the Carmens, as both skated to the music of Bizet's opera Carmen. While a pre-med student at Stanford University, Thomas won both the 1986 U.S. National and World figure skating titles, defeating Tiffany Chin and Witt respectively, becoming the first and only African American to hold those titles in ladies' singles. Tai Babilonia was previously a U.S. and World champion in pair skating.
After her figure skating career, Thomas went back to school to become an orthopedic surgeon. She graduated from Stanford University in 1991 with a degree in engineering and from the Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine in 1997. Thomas followed this with a surgical residency at the University of Arkansas Medical Sciences Hospital and an orthopedic surgery residency at the Martin Luther King Jr. Charles Drew University Medical Center in South Central Los Angeles.
In June 2005, Debi graduated from the Orthopaedic Residency Program at Charles R. Drew University in Los Angeles. She will spend this next year preparing for Step I of the American Board of Orthopaedic Surgeons' exam and working at King-Drew Medical Center as a junior attending physician specialist. In July 2006, she will begin a one-year fellowship at the Dorr Arthritis Institute at Centinela Hospital in Inglewood, California, for sub-specialty training in adult reconstructive surgery. She still remains involved in the figure skating world as a frequent committee member and judge. Thomas was inducted into the U.S. Figure Skating Hall of Fame in 2000.
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