Emmanuel

Crystal Emmanuel is Canada’s fastest female sprinter and has been for most of a decade, with stunning regularity, year after year, whether on the straight or running the curve.

Since she won the sprint double – the 100- and 200-metre races – at the 2011 Canadian Track & Field Championships, Emmanuel has owned the short sprints, plain and simple, placing no lower than second at either distance at the National Championships.

Before Emmanuel came along, no Canadian female sprinter had accomplished the double since 2003, but Emmanuel has done the double three more times since then, collecting both titles in 2016, 2017 and 2018.

She has come close to the sprint double several more times. In 2012 Emmanuel won the 200 metres and was second in the 100-metre final. In 2013 and 2014 she won the 100 metres and was runner-up in the 200-metre final. In 2015, she was second in both the 100 and 200 metres.

Breakthrough improvements often come in small increments in elite sprinting, but Emmanuel experienced a cluster of big ones in 2017, even by her consistently high standards.

For starters, in July she ran a time of 22.50 seconds to win the 200 metres at a meet in Cork, Ireland, smashing Marita Payne-Wiggins’ 34-year-old Canadian record, becoming the fastest Canadian female ever at that distance.

In August, at the 2017 IAAF World Championships she qualified for the 200-metre final, something no Canadian woman had accomplished since Angela Bailey did so in 1983. She wound up seventh in the final, with a time of 22.60 seconds, not far off that freshly minted national standard.

Emmanuel did not qualify for the 100-metre final at those Worlds, but she did set a personal best of 11.14 seconds at that distance, running that time both in her qualifying heat and again in the semifinal. In a deep field of talent, she finished fourth in her semifinal heat, 11th fastest overall, faster than she had ever run before. Just not fast enough for the final eight at the World Championships.

Emmanuel kicked-off her 2018 campaign with a fifth-place finish at the Commonwealth Games, and then produced not one, but two, electrifying performances at the 2019 Canadian Track & Field Championships en route to gold in the women’s 100- and 200-metre final.

She rode that momentum into the NACAC Championships, where she set a new personal best in the 100 metres (11.11 seconds) to win bronze, then followed it with a silver-medal performance in the 200 metres on the same day she anchored Canada’s 4x100-metre relay team that won bronze.

Emmanuel spent the majority of her 2019 season competing internationally in Diamond League meets where she earned a total of three medals, two in the 100 and one more in the 200 metres. She took that success into the Pan American Games in Lima, Peru, where she teamed with Khamica Bingham, Ashlan Best and Leya Buchanan to capture silver in the 4x100-metre relay.

In the lead-up to Tokyo, Emmanuel banked four wins in the Athletics Canada Tokyo Qualifier Series, winning three times in the 100 metres and once in the 200 metres. At the final stop in Montreal, she’d achieve the Olympic Qualification Standard in the 100 metres, with a time of 11.11 seconds. She also put an exclamation mark on her domestic competition season by winning her eighth women’s 100-metre title and her sixth championship in the 200 metres at the Olympic and Paralympic Trials in Montreal in June.