For the first time in his career, Andre de Grasse will not take home a medal from an Olympic event.
De Grasse ran a season best 9.98 seconds in the third and final semifinal heat, but finished in fifth place. It was not enough to advance to the finals, which take place later Sunday.
De Grasse, at 29 years old, came into these Games as Canada’s second-most decorated summer Olympic medallist behind swimmer Penny Oleksiak. With six Olympic medals — in the 100m, 200m and 4x100m relay in each of the 2016 and 2020 Games — he was vocal about his intention to continue climbing the medal leaderboard. “I’m going to try and add to that legacy, try and turn six medals into nine,” he told Postmedia in June.
After a gangbusters 2021 season in which de Grasse set his 100m personal best of 9.89 seconds while racing to bronze at the 2020 Tokyo Games, de Grasse has struggled to break the 10-second barrier and, until recently, it wasn’t even clear if he would line up at the Olympic 100m. Last year, he didn’t advance out of the semi-finals at the Canadian trials, which meant he failed to qualify for the 2023 world championships. He didn’t run the automatic Olympic qualifying time of 10 seconds flat until mid June, less than two weeks before the qualifying window closed.
In round one of the Olympic 100m competition, he ran 10.07 seconds with a self-described “lackadaisical” start, which was just enough for him to finish third and snag the last automatic qualifying spot.
While his run in the 100 is over, De Grasse has two more opportunities to make the podium in the next week. He starts the defence of his 200m gold on Monday and will join teammates Eliezer Adjibi, Duan Asemota, Jerome Blake, Aaron Brown in qualifying rounds of the 4x100m relay on Thursday.