Christian Coleman

On June 16, 2017, he turned professional, skipping his last year of eligibility at Tennessee in order to accept a seven-figure endorsement agreement with Nike. He became the first man on the men’s side to qualify for Team USA in two events at the 2017 World Championships. He placed second in both the 100m and 200m sprints at the 2017 USATF Outdoor Championship. He participated in the 4x100m relay qualifying for Team USA at the 2016 Summer Olympics in Rio de Janeiro. The team won their heat with a time of 37.65 and progressed to the final.

In 2018, he won the 60-meter global indoor title at the IAAF World Indoor Championships in Birmingham, breaking Maurice Greene’s championship record of 6.37 seconds. The timing was also the quickest indoor performance at sea level ever recorded and it was also his first gold medal at a major competition.   Coleman clocked a 9.79-second run into a 0.3 m/s wind during the men’s 100 meters final at the 2018 Diamond League finals in Brussels, Belgium, increasing his personal best by three-hundredths of a second. This also earned him his first Diamond League championship.

As a result of Coleman missing three drug tests in 12 months, the United States Anti-Doping Agency temporarily banned him in August 2019 under the whereabouts regulations for anti-doping. A two-year punishment would have barred him from competing in both the 2019 World Athletics Championships and the 2020 Tokyo Olympic Games. Coleman successfully challenged the verdict, arguing that a first missed test should be backdated to the beginning day of that testing quarter (April 1, 2018, in Coleman’s instance) under the World Anti-Doping Agency’s International Standard for Testing and Investigations. This meant that Coleman had skipped two tests in any given 12-month period when his third whereabouts failure occurred on April 26, 2019.

Coleman won the men’s 100m final at the World Championships in Doha, Qatar on September 28, 2019, with a personal best time of 9.76 seconds. He made the decision to run in the 60 m event at the U.S. Indoor Championships in February 2020. He won the US title in a world-leading 6.37 seconds, matching his second fastest time in history and finishing 0.12 seconds ahead of second place Marvin Bracy. Coleman was given a temporary ban from competition on June 17 owing to a further missing drug test that occurred on December 9, 2019. Later, he filed an appeal with the Court of Arbitration for Sports regarding another ban ruling. Coleman’s ban was lowered to 18 months on appeal on April 16, 2021, concluding on November 13, 2021.

His coach is Tim Hall. He is the associate Head Coach University of Kentucky Track and Field. Coleman had one of the best seasons in collegiate track and field history under Hall’s guidance. Coleman and VFL Justin Gatlin are the only athletes who have ever won the NCAA Championships in the 60- and 200-meter indoor and outdoor events, respectively. Being ranked in the top two on all four collegiate top-10 lists, Coleman also made history by becoming the only individual to do so.

He was born on March 6, 1996, in Atlanta, Georgia, to parents Seth and Dr. Daphne Coleman. Camryn, a former Georgia Southern sprinter and jumper, and Cailyn are his two sisters. Derrick Barker, Jr., a cousin, was an All-Ivy League defensive back at Harvard, while Brian Anderson, another cousin, was a two-year starter and four-year letter winner at Colgate. Sport management was his area of study.