Yahoo Sports Why is Team USA's 4x100 relay team so bad at baton passing in the Olympics? It happened again in Paris.
This is a question without a full answer, isn't it?
The men's 4x100 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:
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 4x100 is really hard. From the Washington Post:
Unlike in the longer relays such as the 4x400, a handoff in the 4x100 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.
More Olympics!
12 electric photos of Team USA's gold medal win during the women's 4x100m relay
This article originally appeared on For The Win: Why is Team USA's 4x100 relay team so bad at baton passing in the Olympics? It happened again in Paris.
