De Grasse

SEPTEMBER 2023 UPDATE:

Andre de Grasse became Canada’s most decorated male summer Olympic athlete with six medals total after winning gold in the 200m, bronze in the 100m, and silver in the 4x100m relay at the 2020 Olympic Games in Tokyo.

At the 2023 World Championships, he finished 6th in the 200m, and at the 2022 Worlds he added another World title to his collection when the 4x100m relay team of Aaron Brown, Jerome Blake, and Brendon Rodney won gold and set a new Canadian record with their time of 37.48.

The best is yet to come.

At only 27 years old, Andre De Grasse has already accomplished what many sprinters only dream of. He’s a triple Olympic medallist, has stood on the podium at the World Championships, captured gold twice at the Pan American Games and established Canadian records in the 200-metres, 4x100- and 4x200-metre relay.

And to think, he laced up a pair of borrowed spikes, pulled on a pair of baggy basketball shorts and a T-shirt, and raced to a second-place finish – sans starting blocks – for the first time less than 10 years ago. It was 10.9 seconds that changed his life forever.

Following that race, Tony Sharpe – himself a medallist at the 1984 Olympics Games – took De Grasse under his wing. He joined Speed Academy, got his life back on track – De Grasse has admitted that he was going nowhere fast, hanging out with a rough crowd, doing drugs and looking for acceptance in the wrong place – and, after being pursued by the top NCAA track and field programs, he landed at the University of Southern California.

De Grasse made headlines across Canada and the United States in June 2015 when he won the 100-metre and 200-metre final at the NCAA Championships in a span of 45 minutes. He had blistering fast times in both – 9.75 seconds in the 100 metres and 19.58 seconds in the 200 metres – but the wind-aided marks didn’t count towards any official records or rankings.

Adding to his breakout season, De Grasse raced to double gold at the Pan American Games in Toronto, sweeping the 100-metre and 200-metre events, and then turned a few heads when he brought home two bronze medals from the World Championships, one in the 100-metres and the other in the 4x100-metre relay.

De Grasse officially turned pro at the end of the 2015 season, choosing to forego his final year of college eligibility. That decision paid off in Rio, when De Grasse made history by becoming the first Canadian athlete to win Olympic medals in all three sprint events.

First came a bronze medal in the 100 metres, making him Canada’s first Olympic medallist in the event since Donovan Bailey in 1996. That was followed by a silver medal in the 200 metres, where he set a national record of 19.80 seconds and helped author one of biggest moments of the Games – sharing a laugh, smile and finger wag with arguably the greatest sprinter of all-time, Jamaica’s Usain Bolt – and then he closed his Olympic debut by anchoring the 4x100-metre relay team to a bronze in a national record time of 37.64 seconds, breaking the 20-year-old mark held by the gold medal squad from Atlanta 1996.

De Grasse’s 2017 season got off to an electrifying start – three Diamond League wins over a 10-day span and double gold at the Canadian Championships. Heading to London for the World Championships, De Grasse was ready to dethrone Bolt once and for all, but he never got the chance. The Canadian was forced to withdraw from the competition after suffering a hamstring tear just days prior.

Though he returned to the track in 2018, the injury continued to hinder De Grasse’s performance, causing him once again to shut down his season following the Canadian Track & Field Championships. In hopes of turning around a career quickly getting derailed by injuries, De Grasse made the tough decision to leave Stuart McMillan and the ALTIS group he’d been with since turning pro to work with Rana Reider in Florida.

That decision paid off. De Grasse returned to the track in 2019 and dipped under the 20-second mark in the 200-metres, broke the Canadian 100-yard record (9.30 seconds) and went toe-to-toe with Aaron Brown in the sprint events at the Canadian Track & Field Championships. He took that momentum to the track in Doha, Qatar, where he won bronze in the 100-metres and silver in the 200-metres, the first World Championships medal for a Canadian in the 200-metre race since Atlee Mahorn in 1991.

Like most track and field athletes, De Grasse’s 2020 season was limited to a handful of races in Florida, where he had Top 3 finishes in all but one race. He returned to the Diamond League circuit and high-calibre international meets in 2021, never placing lower than third heading into the Tokyo Games.

It’s safe to say Canada’s sprint sensation is back, and the best is truly yet to come.