ATHENS, Ga. — College track's gold standard in the 400m is looking to ride a banner season into a golden Olympics debut.
Christopher Morales Williams, a star sophomore at UGA and the NCAA champion this year in the men's 400m, is set to travel to Paris this month with Team Canada for the 2024 Olympics.
Williams made national history for Canada this year when he ran the 400m in 44.05 seconds at the SEC Outdoor Track and Field Championships -- the mark set a new national record. (He also set a national record in the 300m, which is not an Olympic distance, at a meet earlier in the season.)
He then turned in a gold-medal performance at the NCAA Outdoor Track and Field Championships with a finish of 44.47 seconds.
Up next: Paris.
"It's like once you get on a roll all of a sudden, you just keep rolling," he told 11Alive's Cheryl Preheim. "It's not even like -- I dunno, it just feels so easy. But not even like easy as in, 'Oh I'm so good,' just easy as in like, you just kind of do it and then the next race it's like you already know what you have to do to be better. And you just do it.
"It's like so easy to fix your problems," Morales Williams continued. "And you're just on a roll and on a roll and on a roll."
This Olympics will be a first for the 19-year-old, whose accomplishments include a silver medal last year at the Pan American U20 Championships. His country has not had a runner in the men's 400m since Daundre Barnaby in 2012.
"I mean it's the biggest sporting event of all time, next to the World Cup," he said of heading to Paris. "I've been watching it since I was young -- we watched track in the Olympics, just being able to see those guys get the flag on their back and run around the track, for that to be me and to represent my country, that I was born in and grew up in... it means a lot to know that I worked so hard for this and it's all starting to pay off in the end."
While conditions play a big role in track, and you can't cleanly translate a time at one meet into another, his 44.05 national record time achieved at the SEC Championships in May would have been good enough for a silver medal in the 400m final at the Tokyo Olympics -- making Morales, at the least, an intriguing runner to watch in Paris.
Check out Cheryl's full interview with Morales Williams in the video player above this story. He touched on subjects including UGA Track's culture of competitiveness and hard work and his appreciation for the international cultural exchange of the Olympics.
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