This is a question without a full answer, isn’t it?
The men’s 4×100 relay team once again struggled at an Olympics, finishing next to last in the finals in Paris due to a bad pass of the baton between Christian Coleman and Kenny Bednarek, mostly dooming the rest of the legs of the race won by Canada’s squad.
The baton pass continues to be the issue. Per Sports Illustrated in 2016: “The U.S. recent reign of relay terror began when Darvis (Doc) Patton and [Tyson] Gay botched the anchor handoff in Beijing and [Usain] Bolt skated away to his third gold of those games.”
More from that article:
“A year later at the worlds in Berlin, the U.S. botched a handoff in the qualifying round Two years after that in Daegu, Patton stumbled coming in off the third leg and never got the baton to anchor Walter Dix. The U.S. managed to get around to a silver in London, but that medal was stripped when Gay received a doping suspension. At the 2013 worlds, the U.S. was leading when Mookie Salaam failed to execute the anchor pass to Gatlin, who was denied a shot at holding off Bolt. And last summer Gay and Mike Rodgers passed out of the final exchange.”
Since then? More issues. The team in Tokyo 2021 didn’t advance to the final. From New York Magazine:
On the United States’ second baton exchange in Thursday’s race, 100-meter Olympic silver medalist Fred Kerley ran right up the back of his teammate Ronnie Baker, who finished fifth in the 100 meters. As the pair attempted to pass the baton, they looked more like Keystone Cops than two of the five fastest men in the world. By the time they did finally complete the exchange, Baker had lost most of his momentum.
Carl Lewis, back then, had thoughts, including about the baton pass:
The USA team did everything wrong in the men's relay. The passing system is wrong, athletes running the wrong legs, and it was clear that there was no leadership. It was a total embarrassment, and completely unacceptable for a USA team to look worse than the AAU kids I saw .
— Carl Lewis (@Carl_Lewis) August 5, 2021
The broadcast on Friday talked about how practices seemed to be going well, but the answer is also that a baton pass in the 4×100 is really hard. From the Washington Post:
Unlike in the longer relays such as the 4×400, a handoff in the 4×100 happens when both runners are at or near top speed.
Also, the handoff is blind — the runner who is receiving the baton isn’t looking at the person who is handing it to him, which makes communication critical.
Finally, most elite teams try to hand off toward the latter part of the track’s exchange zone so the receiving runner is running at top speed when he gets the baton. That strategy means the baton hardly slows down, but the runners have little room for error.
These are the questions the team will ask once again and have to answer in four years.
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