Materials such as coal or rock are particularly sensitive to tensile load and loading rate. Therefore, mechanical properties characterizations of coals under dynamic tensile load are important for stress mechanism analysis of induced crack during drilling. In this work, cyclic Brazilian splitting method, experimental and numerical, was used to research the failure type and mechanism of coals under different cyclic loading conditions, involved four load rates and three maximum load levels. Deformation behavior, surface roughness and failure mode were the main observation objects in the study. The results show that under cyclic splitting load, the failure mode of coal specimen and surface roughness (measured by fractal dimension D and amplitude A) are related to cyclic loading rate and maximum load level.