Audrey Leduc's new 100m record will likely only stand for as long as she takes to break it
Morgan Campbell | for CBC Sports | Posted: April 25, 2024 8:24 PM | Last Updated: April 25
25-year-old's early season run bodes well for peak performance
If we really want to nit-pick Audrey Leduc's national record-setting last Saturday, I guess we can start with her start.
Video shows a handful of other runners in the women's 100-metre final at the LSU Alumni Gold track meet opening a gap on Leduc in the opening phases of the race, with American Aleia Hobbs, the eventual winner, rocketing away from all of them. Hobbs finished in 10.88 seconds, the second-fastest time in the world so far this year, in front of a fast-closing Leduc, who had shifted gears mid-race to overtake several faster starters. Leduc's final result – 10.96 seconds – set a new personal best, and broke a national record that had stood since 1987.
So, yes, if we want to, we can calculate how much faster we think Leduc could have run with a better start, but my scalpel isn't sharp enough to split that hair. I'd rather focus on her sizzling top-end speed, and how she separated herself from the pack to finish within sniffing distance of Hobbs, a world championship finalist in 2022.
Often, you can gauge the effectiveness of a sprinter's start by looking at how they finish. Leduc achieved a personal best and the Olympic standard while shaving .02 off Angela Bailey's 36-year-old national record. The best start is the one that fits your race model, gets you to your top speed at the right time, and allows you to maintain it as long as possible. By those markers, Leduc, a 25-year-old from Gatineau, Quebec, aced every test last Saturday.
As for the Canadian record, you can track it on a stopwatch — Leduc is one of only two Canadian women in history with a legal sub-11 second clocking — or measure it by the calendar. Bailey set her record in the summer of 1987, back when Brian Mulroney was prime minister, Argos legend Pinball Clemons was a rookie with the Kansas City Chiefs, and Wayne Gretzky was still an Edmonton Oiler.
WATCH | Athletics North — Leduc didn't know she had broken women's 100m Canadian record:
It's pointless to handicap an imagined race between Bailey and Leduc. Different eras, different equipment, and different training techniques.
It's also useless to project what Leduc's 10.96 means in the bigger 100m picture this season. As of Thursday morning, that time ranked her fifth in the world, but none of last year's 100m world medallists have contested the event yet this year. The top end of the world ranking list is guaranteed to change, profoundly, sooner or later. Likely sooner.
Anyway, those hypotheticals don't diminish Leduc's achievement, or distract us from its historical importance in the context of Canadian sport. Whatever Leduc's 10.96 winds up meaning in the big picture, in setting a national record and shattering the stubborn 11-second barrier, she brought us a different kind of clarity.
National records, after all, are hard to achieve, as many high-level Canadian athletes can tell you.
Jerome Drayton's marathon record stood for 43 years before Cam Levins ran 2:09:25 in 2018 to set a new standard.
In the women's sprints, the 200m record belonged to Marita Payne for 35 years before Crystal Emmanuel broke it, running 22.50 in 2018. Payne's 400m record, 49.91, is untouched since 1984.
And on the men's side, Andre De Grasse is going all in to trim .06 seconds from his 100m personal best to eclipse the current record, shared by Donovan Bailey and Bruny Surin, of 9.84 seconds.
WATCH | Athletics North — Can Andre De Grasse go lower than 9.84?:
People with long enough memories or a deep enough fetish for track stats can point out that one Canadian has run faster — Ben Johnson, who is the subject of a must-read new book by veteran journalist Mary Ormsby, and whose 9.79 second clocking at the 1988 Olympics stood as a world record until his drug test came back positive for steroids.
His failed test led to the Dubin Inquiry, which, in turn, prompted several high-level athletes to confess to their own drug use. One of them was Angella Issajenko, a training partner of Johnson's and a bitter rival of Bailey's. Her 10.97 clocking is still listed on the World Athletics website, but was disqualified as a record by Athletics Canada after she confessed to doping.
That background makes Leduc's record run even more refreshing. She didn't just lower Bailey's mark, but also eclipsed Issajenko's drug-assisted shadow record. Now there's no more ambiguity about the fastest woman in Canadian history. Drug-free, drug-fuelled, wind-assisted or otherwise, it's Leduc.
Timing matters, too.
If you're in Leduc's camp, you have to find results this impressive, this early in the season encouraging. Her record-breaking run in Baton Rouge was 0.12 faster than her previous personal best, established three weeks previous at the Florida Relays. Whether she can run another 10th of a second faster this year almost doesn't matter. If your season is structured to peak in August, you're likely still improving in April. At this point in the track and field calendar, optimism abounds.
It's also peak season for info-addicted track fans, with elite performers scattered across the planet, and significant results trickling in all weekend.
WATCH | Athletics North — Marco Arop opens Diamond League season with a golden 800m:
Leduc and Canada's women's relay teams are slated to compete again at LSU on Saturday, while De Grasse is set for two busy days at the East Coast Relays in Jacksonville Fla. On Friday night he's entered in the 200 metres, where he's scheduled to compete alongside Jerome Blake, his training partner, and a fellow member of Canada's 4x100m relay team. And on Saturday De Grasse is listed to run in a loaded 100m heat, where other entrants include Trayvon Bromell, a two-time world bronze medallist, and Lamont Marcell Jacobs, the most recent Olympic champion. Later that day, both De Grasse and Blake are penciled in to run the 4x100m relay.
Factor in the Penn Relays, a Diamond League meet in China, and a USATF-sponsored competition in Bermuda, where Jamaica's Elaine Thompson-Herah is scheduled to open her 100m season, and the worldwide leaderboards figure to look very different by Monday. The current world lead in the women's 100 — 10.77 seconds by U.S. collegian Jacious Sears – might not survive another month.
If history is our guide, Leduc's 10.96 could hold up as a national record for years. But if Leduc's recent improvements are the trend, that record might already be on borrowed time.