Adaejah Hodge Runs 10.63 to Break Sha'Carri Richardson's NCAA 100m Record

Adaejah Hodge crossed the line at Hayward Field on Thursday night and kept running, straight into the exit tunnel, with no idea what she had done. An official had to stop her and explain: her spikes needed checking, because the clock read 10.63 and the NCAA 100-meter record was gone.

Hodge, a 20-year-old Georgia redshirt freshman, ran the time in the semifinals of the NCAA Outdoor Track & Field Championships in Eugene, Oregon, on June 11, 2026, taking down Sha'Carri Richardson's collegiate record of 10.75 from 2019 and moving to fifth on the world all-time list. Not in the final. In a semifinal.

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The evening was built for sprinting: sunny, 77 degrees, and a tailwind of 1.9 meters per second, 0.1 inside the legal limit, on a track already rated among the fastest in the world. Hodge had hinted the record was within reach on April 18, when she ran 10.77 at the Tom Jones Memorial in Gainesville. The difference since then, she says, came out of the blocks.

"I feel like I was wasting too much time in the air in my start, but we fixed that over a couple of weeks," Hodge said on ESPN2 after the race.

Only four women have ever covered 100 meters faster:

That list holds three Olympic 100-meter champions, the reigning world champion and a college student who has not yet run her final. The wind reading on Griffith Joyner's 10.49 has been questioned since 1988; Track & Field News does not acknowledge the mark as a world record.

The record was one item on a three-event evening. Hodge ran the second leg on a Georgia 4x100 relay that clocked 42.00, a school record and the third-fastest time in collegiate history behind the 41.96 USC produced in the other heat. And about an hour after the 100, she won her 200-meter semifinal in 21.96, the sixth-fastest performance in collegiate history. Georgia's athletics department says only Merlene Ottey, in 1990, has matched that single-day 100/200 double.

"I think that's a great accomplishment, but the job isn't over. It's all in God's plan," Hodge said.

Hodge competes internationally for the British Virgin Islands and moved to the United States at age 9; Georgia's roster lists her home as Douglasville, outside Atlanta.

The record also arrives with a complicated file attached. Hodge served a 17-month doping suspension, from August 2024 to January 2026, after testing positive for metabolites of GW1516, a banned substance that alters how the body metabolizes fat. The Athletics Integrity Unit described her use as unintentional and kept the case confidential until March, two months after the ban ended, an unusual step the agency said was necessary to protect a related investigation that Hodge assisted.

The positive test came shortly after her senior year at Montverde Academy in Florida, where she was one of three track athletes to test positive for the same substance. The program's coach, two-time Olympian Gerald Phiri, has been provisionally suspended since March 2025 following a joint investigation by the AIU and the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency; the charges against him include possession of GW1516 during his own racing career.

"It is what it is on paper. And I know the truth behind it. A lot of people may say what they want to say, but those are just haters. Life goes on."

Adaejah Hodge, on her suspension, speaking in Eugene

She returned to racing in January and won an NCAA 200-meter title on March 14. The AIU made her suspension public two days later.

Eugene's straightaway has had quite a week. Twenty-four hours before Hodge's run, Auburn's Ja'Kobe Tharp set a world record of 12.75 in the men's 110-meter hurdles on the same stretch of track.

The 100-meter final goes Saturday at 8:52 p.m. ET, with the 200 final at 9:37 p.m. and the relay final the same evening; ESPN2 carries the session from 8 p.m. Records do not hand out titles, and the wind may not cooperate twice. The pressure, though, has changed addresses.