Christian Coleman may not care whether others see him as the new face of athletics.
But as 100 metres world champion he cannot pick and choose whether to give drugs testing his full attention.
His triumph on Saturday was emphatic; his 9.76 seconds the fastest world final winning time since Usain Bolt rewrote the record books in Berlin a decade ago.
His winning margin of 0.13secs the biggest since Yohan Blake capitalised on Bolt’s false start DQ in Daegu in 2011 to beat Walter Dix by 0.16.
Yet his moment of glory was overshadowed; not so much by those three ‘whereabouts’ filing failures which might have landed him with a ban.
More by the 23-year-old’s apparently casual attitude to an anti-doping protocol which requires elite athletes to submit information onto an app, indicating where they will be available for testing for one hour in each 24.
Coleman said: "I’m young, I travel the world, I have friends in different places and sometimes you go different places and do different things and that’s just not on your mind to update this app.
“That’s just not something I think about every day. I feel like to me it’s not a huge deal because I’m not doing anything to avoid getting tested.”
Track and field, with its chequered history, needs its star performer to see the worth in this system. As Bolt put it: “We have to be strict on doping to help the sport stay in a good place”.
He got it. So must Coleman or athletics loses all credibility.
