The U.S. Olympic Relay Program Is Finally in Good Hands

Over the last 20 years, the U.S. has botched the art of the handoff in every way imaginable. A revamped approach—and a bit of science—could change that trend.

PERFECT PASSES: The U.S. relay teams swept at worlds in 2023 for the first time in 16 years. / Tim Clayton/Corbis/Getty Images

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Mechelle Lewis Freeman had an hour to kill before finding out if she killed her career. She was in Eugene, Ore., for the 2022 World Athletics Championships. Freeman, in her first year as the U.S.’s women’s relay head coach, woke up on the morning of the 4 × 100 final and made a decision that, for more than a century, would have been heretical: She benched her fastest sprinter.

Aleia Hobbs had done nothing wrong. Her exchanges in the preliminary heat were clean—and the U.S had already run a 41.56, the lowest time in the world that year. But Freeman and men’s head coach Mike Marsh were in the process of totally revamping the U.S. relay program, and clean was no longer good enough. They were looking for every edge to create the most efficient possible exchanges. They had drilled their runners on technique and teamwork before the meet at relay camp, which Hobbs missed because she had COVID-19.

Freeman believes relays are a combination of art and science. She had science on her side. Data showed that the fastest baton exchanges were between Abby Steiner, who did not run in the semi, and Jenna Prandini. Now she was counting on the artists on the track.

After Steiner, Prandini, Melissa Jefferson and Twanisha Terry left the warmup area at Hayward Field for the pre-race call room, Freeman stuck around. She did not want to get drawn into idle conversation. She opted to watch the event on TV.

“It’s like you [send] your kids off to camp,” she says. “Have fun, and I’ll see you at the end. You just have an hour to think. There was nothing for me to do but just pray.”

The trouble with prayer is that sometimes deities are in the other lane. Jamaica had won Olympic relay gold the year before and had just swept the individual medals in the women’s 100 in Eugene. 

Freeman says she was “very anxious. At the same time, I was excited because I really believed it was going to work.”

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At the 2008 Beijing Olympics, Tyson Gay (left) failed to grab the baton from teammate Darvis Patton in the first heat of the 4x100 relay. / Photograph by David J. Phillip/AP

Passing the baton seems like the easiest of Olympic tasks—the athletic equivalent of putting paint on a palette. Nobody has ever made an Olympic team simply for a masterful exchange. Even the die-hardiest of track fans do not argue about the greatest baton passers of all time. That is why Team USA’s handoff follies have been so maddening: The U.S. always excels at the hard part (producing four of the fastest people in the world) but often fails at the easy bit.

There is nothing in Olympic history quite like what the U.S. has done in men’s track relays: an extended period of dominance, followed immediately by a long stretch of ineptitude. From 1920 to 2004, American men competed in the 4 × 100 in 19 Olympics. They won 15 gold medals and two silvers. Since then, the U.S. men have made regular summer trips to DQ: They have been disqualified in three of the last four Olympics, as well as the ’09, ’11 and ’15 world championships. (The Americans also forfeited their lone Olympic medal, a silver in ’12, due to a positive drug test.)

After the U.S. screwed up another handoff and finished sixth in qualifying in Tokyo, American legend Carl Lewis called it “a total embarrassment and completely unacceptable for a USA team to look worse than the AAU kids I saw.” The U.S. women have a much better recent track record, but they have had their own handoff nightmares: They were DQ’d from the Olympics in 2004 and again in ’08, when Freeman ran the second leg and then watched as her teammates botched the final exchange. 

The disqualifications don’t even capture all the legal but slow exchanges that have cost the U.S.

You may wonder: How could so many great sprinters continually botch a sprint relay? 

The short answer: in every possible way. They have exchanged the baton too early (in the 2016 Olympic men’s final) and too late (in the ’04 women’s final). They have showed up gassed (Marion Jones flubbed the exchange an hour after competing in the long jump in ’04), failed to grab the baton (Tyson Gay in ’08) and failed to hand it off (Torri Edwards that same year). They have been betrayed by their ears (in ’04, Coby Miller never heard Justin Gatlin yell “Stick!”) and their hands (in ’21, Fred Kerley and Ronnie Baker needed three tries to complete the exchange).

The long answer: Everything that makes the U.S. great has also created a challenge. The Americans’ sprinting depth is an asset, but it’s also a liability. The U.S. almost always has multiple men with individual medal aspirations, and they tend to be headstrong. A relay is essentially a request to team up with their chief rivals. Depth also creates a lot of turnover from one Olympic cycle to the next, which means that, figuratively, the U.S. is constantly passing the baton.

In some countries, top sprinters train together, but U.S. runners are spread out across several time zones. (Jamaica, which has won five relay medals at the last three Games, is smaller in area than 48 U.S. states.) Jamaican icon Usain Bolt once said the Americans “tend to panic.” That is what happens when athletes feel the weight of expectations without the reassurance of being prepared.

The U.S. also dominated sprint relays for so long that, like U.S. men’s basketball players, its runners started to think they could just show up and win gold. Then the rest of the world improved. USA Basketball adapted by instituting a new, more detailed approach after the 2004 Olympics. USA Track and Field is now, finally, doing the same.

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The U.S. men's 4x100 relay team was disqualified in the 2016 final for Mike Rodgers's early handoff to Justin Gatlin (center) outside of the designated zone. / Photograph by Kirby Lee/USA TODAY Sports

For pretty much the entire 20th century, the U.S. viewed the 4 × 100 as a chance to put the four fastest 100-meter sprinters in a race together. But it is not as simple as four consecutive 100-meter races.

In the individual 100, everyone starts in the blocks and runs a 100-meter straightaway. In the 4 × 100, exchange zones are 30 meters long, so sprinters run up to 130 meters, and the race covers the whole track, which means running through turns. So it is very possible for a 200-meter specialist (who is used to curves and longer distances) to be better at running a 4 × 100 leg than someone who normally runs the 100.

Then there are the legs themselves. The first and third sprinters run on the inside of the lane, with the baton in their right hands; the second and fourth run on the outside of the lane, taking the baton in their left hands. The first runner is the only one who starts in the blocks. The second and third runners must do two handoffs. The anchor leg involves the least amount of curve but requires a different level of mental toughness.

The only handoff that occurs on a straightaway is between the second and third legs, which affects the depth perception of the runner taking the handoff. “It’s the hardest judgment of speed,” Freeman says. “They just want to go, because you think somebody’s coming at you, and you don’t want to get run over.”

Ideally, a team can refine exchanges with practice. But there is a six-week gap between the Olympic Trials and the Olympics, and Marsh says that “of those six weeks, we are fortunate if we have four days of preparation.” Freeman says they hope every exchange in the Olympics involves runners who have had three such exchanges at race pace this year—which would be a massive improvement.

In the finals at the Tokyo Games, the U.S. competed with a lineup that had not run together in that order. (They won silver.) Marsh, a two-time Olympian in the 4 × 100, said he would love to use one consistent group in each relay, “but that objective will compete with other objectives.”

Noah Lyles, the reigning 100- and 200-meter world champion, ran the 4 × 100 anchor leg at the world relay championships in May and will presumably do the same in Paris. But because of the schedule, the U.S. might have to make it to the final without him. The 200 semi is at night on Aug. 7. The 200 final is at night on Aug. 8. The 4 × 100 qualifying is sandwiched between them: midday on the 8th.

Marsh and Freeman are compensating for their limited preparation time with a uniform system: Every runner is drilled on reading takeoff marks and passing the baton the same way, rather than based on personal preference, so “it shouldn’t matter who is going out and who is coming in,” Freeman says.

After the 2004 Olympic final, Jones said, “We knew that if we got the baton around, we’d have a good chance at gold.” That mentality is no longer acceptable at USATF. The goal is not merely to get the baton around. It is to get it around as fast as possible. That sounds as if it would increase the risk of a drop. But it is actually the safest way to pass, for two reasons.

The first reason is physics: The best way to maximize exchange speed is to eliminate the velocity gaps between runners. If two sprinters are running at the same pace at the time of the handoff, they effectively turn a high-speed exchange into a low-speed one. Imagine if you had to give a friend in another car a high five on the highway. It would be a lot easier if you were both going the same speed.

Baton in hand, anchorman Noah Lyles secured gold—his third of the championships—at the 2023 worlds. Lyles is a 200-meter specialist. / Photograph by Steph Chambers/Getty Images

The second reason is psyches: Athletes in any sport tend to perform better when they are trying to achieve success rather than avoid failure.

Marsh and Freeman analyze every sprinter’s splits, so they know who is best for their first 30 meters and who finishes the strongest. Marsh says they comb through video of every exchange, even successful ones, to identify technical errors. “Often, when I’ve watched a video many times, say 20, I pick up on something I hadn’t noticed before,” he says.

When the U.S. runners finally do practice together, their coaches try to simulate a race environment. Marsh says that means “creative experiments” to introduce “the presence of anxiety and random distractions.” They even make sure that lane widths and the coloring of track markings match the ones in international races. They also share their plans with their sprinters well ahead of time. Freeman says that requires “hard conversations,” like the one she had in Oregon with Hobbs. But “the good thing,” she says, “is that it won’t be a surprise.”

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As the first-leg sprinters settled into the blocks at Hayward Field, Freeman stood behind former Olympic sprinter Dennis Mitchell in the warmup area away from the track. Mitchell once told Freeman the key to a successful relay is that “no matter what you’re feeling, you’ve got to be with people who want the same thing”—but he knows from experience that it’s not always that simple.

Mitchell was the 4 × 100 relay captain at the 1996 Olympics. Lewis lobbied all week for a chance to anchor the relay, so he could win a 10th gold medal. U.S. coach Erv Hunt felt loyal to those who ran the fastest 100s at the Olympic Trials. Shortly before the final, Mitchell helped make the decision to bench Tim Montgomery for Marsh, who “found out uncomfortably close” to race time that he was running. Tim Harden had so little experience handing off to Marsh that he switched the baton from one hand to the other as he ran. If you have been paying attention, you know that pretty much everything you have read in this paragraph was wrong, wrong, wrong. Canada stunned the U.S.

And in Oregon in 2022, the American women stunned Jamaica. Everything that Freeman believed and learned, her team heard and trusted. As Terry crossed the finish line, the crowd erupted, and Freeman grabbed Mitchell’s shoulders and screamed. With science on their side, the Americans were finally greater than the sum of their art.