Andre De Grasse is Canadian sprinting's biggest thing since Donovan Bailey

One reason the 100 metres is the alpha event of the summer Olympics roster is that there's still a part of it that cannot be coached, inculcated from an early age and high performance centred until the athlete is a machine with a heartbeat.

In English, either you can run really, really fast over a short span or you cannot. That's part of the appeal with Canada's new out-of-the-blocks star Andre De Grasse, the 20-year-old Markham, Ont., native that ran a 9.95-second 100 in Edmonton on Friday, the first sub-10-second 100 in this country since the 2001 worlds in the same city. De Grasse, not unlike Olympic champion and former world record holder Donovan Bailey, was a convert from basketball who came to track by happenstance; he's only in his fourth year of sprinting. He's also come along when the timing and tide might be right for Canada to embrace a sprinter again, since Bailey came along just too soon after Ben Johnson, whose name 28 years later is still to Athletics Canada what Voldemort's was to Hogwarts Academy.

Being 20 years old and already clocking in the 9.9 range regularly is a big deal. Sprinters, going back over many years, need time to build those big leg muscles and allows them to sustain their explosion off the blocks. The peak for sprinters typically averages out to 25.4 years old, which would lead one to think that De Grasse has a full another full Olympic quadrennial beyond the current one, with the upcoming Pan Am Games in his backyard and the 2016 Rio Olympics, to hit his ceiling. He is a relative spring chicken.

Of course, that result in Edmonton actually pales next to De Grasse having "the most remarkable sprint double ever at the NCAA championships" on June 12, when he won the 100 and 200 whilst running for the University of Southern California. Running with a tailwind (which disqualified his times from being Canadian records), he ran an eye-popping 19.58-second 200 and also had a 9.75 100.

Talk about one reason to opt in to paying attention to the Pan Ams. Granted, Toronto's traffic snarls will make it hard for some to drive 100 metres in fewer than 10 seconds, but it's always good to be early to an emerging sports star.

Neate Sager is a writer for Yahoo! Canada Sports. Follow him on Twitter @naitSAYger.