Quantum leap: Andre De Grasse’s search for 0.06 seconds that could win him Olympic gold

After Andre De Grasse sprints through the finish line, early on the first Saturday of January in Jacksonville, Fla.,, he strolls to lane eight, at the outer edge of the northernmost corner of the running track at Hodges Stadium, huffing, puffling, struggling. He bends at the waist and rests his hands on his knees, as if the full weight of the workout has just landed on him.

Four times, 250 metres, 29 seconds per run, five minutes between reps. 

De Grasse, the most decorated sprinter in Canadian history, drops to all fours, then rolls over onto his back. Above him, ospreys circle in the overcast sky. De Grasse, who has won 11 world championship and Olympic medals, staggers to his feet and ambles back toward the start line. That was rep number three.

“One more, Dre!” shouts Ryan Thomas, an assistant coach with the Tumbleweed Track Club, which trains at the University of North Florida. “One more. C’mon champ!”

 Most of the other world-class sprinters here have already finished their running. Nia Ali, De Grasse’s partner and a world-champion hurdler, had some 150-metre sprints, as did Jerome Blake, who runs second on Canada’s 4x100-metre relay team. Trayvon Bromell, the American standout and two-time world bronze medallist, blazed through a set of 120s, while Lamont Marcell Jacobs, the 100-metre champion from the Tokyo Olympics, had a light workout on a turf field nearby.

They’ll finish in the weight room, but only after a quartet of sprinters that includes De Grasse, who is stooped again, handles this last run.

“C’mon Dre!” shouts Jacobs, the only Italian 100-metre champion in Olympic history. “Hard work!”

As De Grasse trudges up the track, he looks like he’d rather undergo oral surgery than run another 250, but this early in the year, this workout is supposed to suck.

At a cellular level, it burns.

Each 29-second run causes a buildup of hydrogen ions in a runner’s muscles, a byproduct of burning glucose for energy. When that happens, pH levels nosedive, literally creating an acidic environment, making a sprinter’s limbs feel as hot and heavy as molten lead. As the season progresses, according to head coach Rana Reider’s training plan, De Grasse will adapt to sessions like this. His muscles will become more efficient at buffering those hydrogen ions, recycling them into lactate, then using those molecules to fuel more effort.

Then we’ll see vintage Andre De Grasse, the sprinter who hits top speed fairly late in his races, but maintains that velocity better than almost anyone else alive. That’s the athlete who came from behind to win the 200 metres at the Tokyo Olympics in 2021. American Kenny Bednarek led through 120, but the final 80 belonged to De Grasse, who finished in 19.62 seconds to claim a gold medal and a new Canadian record. Hydrogen ions didn’t bother him that night. 

 Right now, though, they’re making his muscles burn. He could use another minute to recover, but he’s already back at the start line.

The rep starts and Trevor Stewart lets loose. He’s a 400-metre specialist, built for this type of workout. He rockets around the curve and speeds down the home stretch, each stride widening the gap between him, De Grasse, and the others.

De Grasse, as a rule, doesn’t dwell on his accomplishments, even though they’re numerous. He has medalled in every Olympic event he has ever contested – six trips to the podium in total. But he says reminiscing about the past siphons focus from the present.

As he labours down the straightaway, though, he allows his mind to drift to his triumphs, just to remind himself what he’s capable of. Why he should grind through this last rep. What’s possible if he keeps pushing.

Especially this year.

Before De Grasse retires, he aims to win Olympic gold in the 100, and to break the Canadian record of 9.84 seconds, shared by Donovan Bailey and Bruny Surin. Eclipsing that mark means shaving at least .06 seconds from his 9.89-second personal best, and winning the Olympics might require an even bigger improvement. For a veteran sprinter at his level, it’s a quantum leap. 

Since 2015, De Grasse has lowered his 100-metre personal best by .03 seconds. To overtake Bailey and Surin he’ll need double that margin.

At 29, De Grasse is entering his 10th season of world-class track, a career stage where mileage can accumulate, and margins of error can narrow. He has already lost parts of two seasons to hamstring injuries, and portions of two more to a damaged big toe. The 2028 Summer Games in Los Angeles are too far in the future to predict, but De Grasse enters the 2024 outdoor season feeling strong and confident. If Olympic gold and a 100-metre national record are the goals, Paris 2024 might represent De Grasse’s last, best chance to achieve them.

I feel like I’m still in my prime. I feel like I can still run fast.

“I feel like I’m still in my prime. I feel like I can still run fast,” says De Grasse, who is slated to open his outdoor season April 26 in Jacksonville. “It’s just that now, as I do my workouts, my body just doesn’t want to co-operate or recover as fast as it used to. All I have to do is be mentally strong. Physically fit. Healthy.”

De Grasse crosses the finish line a few strides behind Stewart, slows from a sprint to a jog to a walk, and flips his Oakley shades up so they rest on his hairline. His steps shorten as he heads back to meet the rest of the group. He drops to his hands and knees again, then rolls on to his back once more.

Four hard runs in just over 20 minutes. Everything hurts. De Grasse hates the feeling, but he’s familiar with it. His body will adjust, and he says he’ll be ready for Paris in August. It’s only January. The calendar is on his side. 

For now.

                                  ♦ ♦ ♦ 

Andre De Grasse has a math problem.

Any 100-metre world or Olympic final will feature several runners with a faster personal best. Americans Christian Coleman and Fred Kerley have both run 9.76 seconds, while Ferdinand Omanyala of Kenya has run 9.77. The U.K.’s Zharnel Hughes has run 9.83. Oblique Seville and Akeem Blake of Jamaica both ran 9.86 last season, and teenage phenom Letsile Tebogo of Botswana ran 9.88 to win world championship bronze last August.

By the numbers, De Grasse is only the third-fastest person in his training group. Bromell has run 9.76 seconds, and Jacobs, a new addition to the team, ran 9.80 to win Olympic gold in 2021. You can barely fit all that talent in a nine-lane final, never mind squeeze it on to a podium built for three. Winning the 100 in Paris might mean dipping into Usain Bolt territory.

It's going to be a 9.7 race, for sure.

“It’s going to be a 9.7 race, for sure,” Bromell says. “Maybe faster. If I’m in it, I’m going for gold.”

And then there’s Noah Lyles. Like De Grasse, the American sprint star is a national record-holder at 200 metres, with a renewed focus on the 100. But unlike De Grasse, he has been nearly unbeatable since the Tokyo Olympics. At the 2022 world championships he ran the 200 in 19.30 seconds, breaking Michael Johnson’s American record, which had stood since the 1996 Olympics. Last August he won the 100 and 200 at worlds, becoming the first male sprinter to complete the double since Bolt did it in 2015.

Both Lyles and De Grasse tackled the 60-metre dash over the winter. De Grasse peaked at 6.62 seconds, unremarkable by world-class standards, but in line with past performances. His personal best, set in 2015, is 6.60. Lyles, meanwhile, dropped his 60-metre personal best from 6.51 to 6.43 this season, winning silver behind Coleman at World Indoors, and spurring fantasies about how it will all translate to the 100 and 200, where Bolt’s world record, 19.19 seconds, suddenly looks vulnerable.

“If we add that to what I’ve already done in the 200, I’m running 19.10,” Lyles told LetsRun.com, when asked about the implications of his improved 60-metre speed.

The math suggests a .19 second deficit at 60 metres is insurmountable, but De Grasse covered the first 60 metres of the Tokyo Olympic final in 6.48 seconds, according to an analysis by French coach Pierre-Jean Vazel, well ahead of his official indoor personal record. His final 40 took just 3.41 seconds, trailing only Jacobs, the eventual gold medalist.

The same with maximum velocity, another key metric. Jacobs led all finalists at 12.03 metres per second, according to Vazel’s calculations. De Grasse came next, at 11.86, even topping Kerley, the silver medalist. Reider has run the numbers, and figures that De Grasse can skim a tenth of a second early without sacrificing his trademark late-race surge. 

I’d be grateful if I could run 9.7 and that was it for the rest of my career. I’d be ecstatic.

“If we’re 3.8-something at 30 metres, and then he uses his normal speed, he runs the Canadian record, and faster,” Reider says. “We just maintain his max velocity and improve his acceleration. Everyone’s seen what he can do max velocity-wise. That doesn’t change.”

De Grasse’s 30-metre split in Tokyo: 3.88 seconds.

For his part, De Grasse plans to solve his math problem by concentrating on the process, and not the numbers.

“I don’t want to put a time on myself. I just focus on winning and the time will come,” he says. 

Then he reconsiders. He’s a process-driven athlete, but track and field is still a numbers-driven sport.

“I’ve shown signs of running 9.7,” he adds. “I’d be grateful if I could run 9.7 and that was it for the rest of my career. I’d be ecstatic.”

                             ♦ ♦ ♦

“Set!”

Trayvon Bromell shouts the command from a few feet behind the start line on a crisp, cloudless Friday morning. Lamont Marcell Jacobs raises his hips and shifts his weight onto his right hand, tilting forward until the support arm in this three-point stance is perpendicular to the track. A thin cord tethering him to a device called the 1080 Sprint stretches taut. The machine offers calibrated resistance – each runner today is pulling 10 percent of their body weight – while feeding speed and power output data to a laptop computer.

“Go!”

Jacobs bursts from his stance with the sudden power of an Olympic sprint champion. Chin down, body slanted forward, his limbs are all straight lines, sharp angles and quick, decisive rhythm. He goes 30 hard metres then slows up.

Later, De Grasse and Jerome Blake line up side by side, then blast off in unison. De Grasse in long sleeves, his bright orange Puma spikes flashing in the sun. Blake in a tank top and fluorescent pink Nikes, a few milliseconds behind.

Bromell, wearing running shoes instead of spikes, powers down the track so quickly you can barely tell he’s hitched to the 1080 machine. He’s still coming back from Achilles tendon surgery and doesn’t plan to compete until May, but he looks like he could race today, in January.

In any other training group, Bromell, De Grasse or Jacbos would be the star. But in Jacksonville, they’re part of an ensemble cast of men’s sprinters that also includes Blake, and Japan’s Abdul Hakim Sani Brown, a four-time world championship finalist who has run the 100 metres in 9.97 seconds.

“We all have a common goal: to run fast,” says Blake, who moved to Jacksonville after training with American coach Dennis Mitchell in Monteverde, Fla . “You’ve just gotta make up your mind and go after what you want.”

It’s a great idea in theory. None of them has to wonder how they measure up to other top-tier elites between meets. They’re lining up together every day in practice.

But they’re also three big personalities, in an event where high self-regard, like fast-twitch muscle, is a job requirement. How will they coexist in the summer, when the weather and the competition heat up?

Much like the reactions that turn hydrogen ions into lactate, it’s a question of chemistry. 

They’re buddies 10 months out of the year, but there’s gonna be a couple of races where they’re trying to smash each other.

“Personality-wise, they have to figure that out on their own. They’re grown-ass men,” Reider says. “They’re buddies 10 months out of the year, but there’s gonna be a couple of races where they’re trying to smash each other.”

Bromell has a long history with Reider – he arrived in Jacksonville in 2019 – and a deep bond with De Grasse. They first became friends at the Pan Am Junior Championships in 2013, tied for 100 metre bronze at the world championships two years later, and both turned pro the following fall.

 Jacobs, a surprise winner in Tokyo in 2021, and world indoor champion the next winter, arrived in the fall of 2023, eager to jump-start his career after two underwhelming, injury-filled seasons in Italy. By January, Jacobs was still adjusting to Reider’s program, and its emphasis on power output.

The 1080 sprints light up your hips and hamstrings, De Grasse says, and the feeling lingers the next day. Jacobs says weight room movements like hang cleans and Kaiser Machine squats hit him somewhere even more fundamental. 

He pats his glutes.

“I never knew I had this muscle,” Jacobs says.

De Grasse, back in Jacksonville after a season in Orlando training with John Coghlan, figures to acclimatize more quickly. He usually thrives in new environments.

In 2015, as a junior at USC in his only full season with coach Caryl Smith-Gilbert, he ran 19.88 seconds in the 200 at the Pan Am Games in Toronto, winning gold and setting a national record. A month later, he and Bromell both ran 9.92 in a dead heat for world championship bronze in the 100.

He turned pro for the 2016 season, relocated to Phoenix to work with head coach Stu McMillan, and still put up impressive numbers – 9.91 for Olympic bronze in the 100, and 19.80, another national record, en route to 200-metre silver. That semifinal produced the photo that turned De Grasse from world-class sprinter to worldwide brand – he and the GOAT in adjacent lanes exchanging grins as they crossed the finish line.

After two more seasons in Phoenix, each cut short by hamstring problems, De Grasse joined Reider’s group for the first time in 2019. He ran a personal-best 9.90 to win world championship bronze in the 100 in Doha, and took silver behind Lyles in the 200. Three weeks earlier, he had run his fastest 200-metre time of the season – 19.87 seconds – at a Diamond League meet in Belgium.

In that context, De Grasse’s struggles under Coghlan last season seemed out of character. He topped out 10.16 seconds in the 100, and was eliminated in the preliminary rounds at Canadian nationals last June. Heading into worlds, he also had not cracked 20 seconds for the 200, widely considered his best event.

 De Grasse blames the situation, rather than the coach. In Orlando, he and Ali enrolled their children in a private school 35 minutes from their house, and he says the time spent driving from home to school to practice, and back, dragged on training and recovery. De Grasse was also the only elite male sprinter in Coghlan’s training group.

“I had to learn to train by myself,” he says, relaxing on a bench in the lobby of UNF’s basketball arena, outside Tumbleweed’s weight room.

Ali, seated nearby, laughs at the assertion.

“She can train by herself,” he says of Ali. “She’s very good at it.”

Obviously, I still have something to give. It’s all mental. A confidence thing. You know you can still do it. You just have to do it when it matters.

That elicits an eye-roll from Ali, a world champion in 2019 and a silver medalist in Rio in 2016. She then corrects the record. Neither she nor De Grasse trained alone. They trained together, for different events.

“I call him a training partner,” says Ali, a two-time world indoor champion, still laughing. “He doesn’t call me a training partner.”

Either way, after years of running his best races under high pressure, De Grasse fizzled at worlds in Budapest last August. He skipped the 4x100-metre relay prelim to focus on his 200 final, saying he didn’t have the energy for both races. Canada’s relay team, with Mobolade Ajomale replacing De Grasse at anchor, failed to qualify for the final. De Grasse later finished sixth in the 200, and Budapest marked his first time leaving a global championship without a medal.

“Usually that’s not like me,” he says. “But that year I wasn’t in the mental capacity - or physical capacity - to handle that load. I wanted to try to prevent another injury.”

Late in the 2023 season De Grasse began working with an Italian coach named Marco Ariale, and in early September he ran a 19.89-second 200 metres in Brussels. He closed the season by running 19.76 to win the Diamond League final in Eugene, Oregon. That time was De Grasse’s fourth-fastest wind-legal 200-metre time ever, and a reminder that he was still a top-tier performer.

“Obviously, I still have something to give,” he says. “It’s all mental. A confidence thing. You know you can still do it. You just have to do it when it matters.”

So why did he switch coaches before the season?

When he made the move late in 2022, De Grasse told reporters he “wanted to try something new.”

His desire to change programs also coincided with an ongoing probe by the U.S. Center for Safe Sport into sexual misconduct claims against Reider, who acknowledged to investigators that he’d had a consensual relationship with an adult female athlete in 2014, but denied other allegations. The case, which began after the 2021 season, prompted U.K. Athletics to withhold funding from any athlete still training with Reider, which in turn spurred British sprinters Adam Gemili and Daryll Neita, among other pros, to leave the group.

De Grasse and Ali remained with Reider through the 2022 season, which included another signature moment –  De Grasse out-running American Marvin Bracy on the anchor leg of the 4x100 at the world championships to seal a gold medal for Canada. After the season, he and Ali moved to Orlando to work with Coghlan. 

De Grasse said his split with Reider was unrelated to the Safe Sport probe.

Then, this past November, De Grasse announced that he was returning to Jacksonville. He told reporters that he and Ali preferred their home there, and its proximity to their kids’ school. A shorter commute would simplify everyone’s lives.

His decision also followed the conclusion of Reider’s Safe Sport case last May. Adjudicators found that Reider’s relationship with an 18-year-old athlete represented a “power imbalance,” but dismissed the remaining claims. Reider was given a 12-month probation, which is set to expire next month, and ordered to take an online course on Safe Sport education. But Reider, who has guided De Grasse to the fastest times of his career, is otherwise free to coach without restrictions.

                               ♦ ♦ ♦

De Grasse starts the second half of his Friday session by loading a 20kg barbell with 85 kgs of plates, and in two motions – a hinge at the hips, then a quick, violent, efficient lift – he hoists the bar to his shoulders. That’s the hang clean, and De Grasse’s technique and bar speed would impress any experienced lifter.

A sensor clipped to the bar confirms the eye test. De Grasse, who weighs 70kg, moved the bar at 1.8 metres per second. Results from each lift pop up on a tablet computer bolted to the weight rack. The goal is 2.0 metres per second for each of the 12 reps scheduled, but this early in the season, his coaches say, moving the weight is more important than hitting an exact velocity target. Two metres per second is perfect; 1.8 is good enough.

But not for De Grasse, who straps in a few minutes later, and heaves the bar to his shoulders again. 

One point eight.

No single variable explains De Grasse’s record-setting speed, but this weight-room power display provides a clue. Few people who weigh 70kg can hang clean this much weight, this quickly. And people who can clean more than 100 kilos at speeds near two metres per second usually weigh much more than 70kg.

That power-to-weight ratio is less a function of muscle mass than a next-level central nervous system inherited at birth, and sharpened through targeted training. De Grasse doesn’t just have a runner’s body. He has a sprinter’s circuitry.

“From his neuromuscular coordination, his CNS – he’s wired,” Reider says.

De Grasse bumps the weight to 108kg. Reider suggests setting up closer to the rack, to shorten the distance between the sensor on the bar and the device reading the data, and yield more accurate numbers.

De Grasse takes a shorter walkout this time, and hikes the barbell from thighs to shoulders in an eyeblink. Velocity reading – 2.17 metres per second.

The next rep, 2.11.

Another: 2.09.

One more, and De Grasse leans close to the tablet to see the readout – 2.15 metres per second.

“Ooooooooh!” he says, impressed with himself.

De Grasse professes not to care about numbers, but today they have his attention.

                                   ♦ ♦ ♦

Forty-five minutes later, weight room lights dimmed, De Grasse peels off his t-shirt and heads to a spot next to the wall, where a chair rests between a pair of high-powered lamps. He sits, then flips a switch. LED bulbs bathe his torso in red light. Proponents of the treatment say it stimulates blood flow and cell regeneration, reducing inflammation and helping athletes rebound from tough workouts.

Most days De Grasse’s after-practice routine involves some type of therapy – either physio, chiropractic or red light. This deep into his career, he needs to recover as intensively as he trains. Twenty-nine isn’t old. It’s just not 21. De Grasse’s body reminds him regularly.

“When I was younger I’d bounce back so quick, be able to do back-to-back days. Starts. Whatever it is. Sprints,” he says. “Now, you gotta make sure of your recovery, nutrition, hydration, making sure you’re ready for the next day. If you don’t, you’re gonna feel it.”

In this sense, the calendar isn’t his ally.

Winning Olympic gold will likely require a steep improvement on personal best, but only 12 sprinters have ever legally run 9.80 or faster. Of that group, only one was older than 28 – Justin Gatlin, who ran 9.74 in 2015, at age 33.

Reider, for his part, thinks De Grasse’s injury history might actually boost his longevity, pointing out that the hamstring problems that shortened his 2017 and 2018 seasons also spared him mileage that might otherwise have dulled his late-career speed. As for the big toe injury that dragged on his 2022 and 2023 seasons – that’s healed now, too.

Now healthy, De Grasse says he can focus on 2024, but he can also glimpse a bigger finish line ahead. He plans to compete through the 2028 Olympics in Los Angeles. After that, retirement looms.

And when De Grasse glances backward, he can see phenoms like 20-year-old Tebogo, the bronze medalist over 200 metres in Budapest last summer, and American Erryon Knighton, also 20, who won silver in Budapest, and who has run 19.49. 

He recognizes them because he was once them – young and talented, and ready to build his name by knocking off somebody more established. In 2015, when De Grasse and Bromell tied for bronze in Beijing, veterans like Asafa Powell, Tyson Gay, and Mike Rodgers learned how it feels to lose ground to a new generation of stars. 

Will that cycle repeat in 2024?

“I don’t want that to be me,” De Grasse says, with a laugh that trails off.

One day of heavy training done. Another coming tomorrow. Paris inching ever closer.

He settles back in his seat and scrolls through his phone. A few more minutes of red light. If the LED lamps work like they’re supposed to, he’ll wake up tomorrow feeling recharged.

The calendar turns against every athlete eventually.

De Grasse’s plan to stop it from happening?

Train hard, recover harder, repeat.

Run fast enough to keep time on his side.

For one more year, at least.

(PHOTOS: Main - Getty; 1st scroller - Canadian Press; 2nd scroller - Associated Press)