Who is the World's Fastest Nonblack Man?

In the men's 100 meter dash to determine the World's Fastest Man, how many sprinters without a sub-Saharan parent made the semifinals?

I won’t give away who won the men’s 100 meter dash in Paris, the sprint to determine the World’s Fastest Man, in case you want to watch it in tape delay on prime time (I’ll just say the final was very close). But let’s check in on the unofficial competition to be the fastest nonblack in the world by making it through yesterday’s first round of heats and qualifying for one of the 27 slots in earlier today’s semifinals.

The rules for this event are that you can’t have a sub-Saharan parent.

As I may have mentioned once or twice over the years, going back through Carl Lewis’s 1984 Los Angeles Olympics and up through 2021 in Tokyo, men with at least one black parent qualified for 79 of the 80 slots in 100 meter sprint finals. In 2021, China’s Su Bingtian broke the all-black streak at 72 straight across nine Olympics by running a memorable 9.83 to win his semifinal.

I won’t give away yet what happened to The Streak on Sunday.

On Saturday, Louie Hinchcliffe of Great Britain won his heat of the first round with an impressive 9.98, beating the presumably coasting American star Noah Lyles, who ran 10.04.

Hinchcliffe’s father is English and his mother Filipino.

Puripol Boonson of Thailand squeezed into the semifinals with a 10.13, so Southeast Asia represented well in 2024. He’s only 18, so he’s probably two Olympics away from peaking at Brisbane in 2032.

Other semifinal qualifiers you might wonder about: Joshua Hartmann of Germany is described as having a German mother and a father from New York with Ghanaian roots

Sani Brown Abdul Hakim of Japan has a Japanese mother and a Ghanian father.

Chituru Ali of Italy has another one of those Ghanian fathers and a Nigerian mother.

Lamont Marcell Jacobs, the defending gold medalist, advanced. His father is African-American and his mother Italian.

Jacobs and Ali

Andre de Grasse of Canada is a little fairer than most 100 meter men, but his mother is from Trinidad and his father from Barbados.

So, congratulations to Louie Hinchcliffe, the World’s Fastest Nonblack Man.

You know, it’s almost as if the Race Doesn’t Exist convention wisdom is wrong when it comes to the 100 meter race …