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Darvis Patton after a botched exchange at the world championships in South
Korea in 2011.
By SAM BORDEN
Published: July 23, 2012
18 Comments
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It is the sound no relay runner wants to hear,
a sound so soft and unassuming it might
barely be noticed in the stands but
nonetheless reverberates, over and over,
down on the track.
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Four years ago at the
Beijing Olympics, the United States
men’s and women’s 4x100-meter relay
teams dropped batons — and heard the
pings of them hitting the track —
during a disastrous performance that
prompted the chief executive of USA
Track & Field to promise a
“comprehensive review” of the entire
relay program.
Four years earlier in Athens, shoddy
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Olympics 2012 — U.S. Track Relays Hope to Avoid Another Baton Dro... http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/23/sports/olympics/olympics-2012-us...
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baton passing by the American men
had allowed a British relay team to pull
off an upset, while the United States
women were disqualified after a
botched exchange. There have been
similar troubles at the world
championships.
Olivier Morin/Agence FrancePresse — Getty Images
A botched exchange
between Tyson Gay and
Darvis Patton at the 2008
Beijing Olympics.
Enlarge This Image
Barton Silverman/The New York
Times
A miss in the handoff
from Marion Jones to
Lauryn Williams at the
2004 Athens Olympics.
Enlarge This Image
Thomas Kienzle/Associated
Press
A drop on the pass from
Mardy Scales to Leonard
Scott at the 2005 world
championships.
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Now, as American track teams again
loaded with blazing feet prepare for the
London Games, the biggest concern
has more to do with their hands.
“It hasn’t been what we wanted,” the
veteran sprinter Allyson Felix said this
spring. “There’s pressure to get the
baton around safely, and we know that.
It’s awful when it doesn’t come
together.”
On the surface, relay batons do not
seem particularly calamitous. They are
about 12 inches long, smoothly
cylindrical, free from adornments, and
they go by an elementary nickname:
the Stick. Yet batons inspire complex
appraisals from those who have heard
that ping and cast a frightful glance
backward to find years of hope
tumbling down the track.
In interviews over the last few months,
Readers’ Comments
one athlete compared the challenge of
Readers shared their thoughts
the baton exchange to two ships
on this article.
Read All Comments (18) »
passing in the night (but if the ocean
were the size of a phone booth), while
another likened it to a harried traveler’s trying to catch up
to (and hold hands with) his wife as he maneuvered on a
moving walkway in a crowded airport. Neither one was
joking.
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Jon Drummond, who as the relays coach for USA Track &
Field will be essentially the chief of batons for the United
States in London, took a slightly different tack, invoking the
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familiar setup of an SAT math problem in describing the
difficulties of a successful pass.
“If you have two cars on the freeway,” Drummond said,
holding his fingers up to demonstrate, “and one is driving
28 miles an hour and another is driving 19 miles an hour, at
some point there is going to be a wreck, right?”
Drummond slammed the “cars” — his fists — together.
“Unless you have something to kind of stop it from
happening,” he said. “That’s what the baton represents.”
That stark reality is perhaps why there seems to be little
love between track athletes and batons. Track is not like
baseball, say, where a particularly superstitious third
baseman might sleep with his glove under his pillow or a
neophyte hitter will snooze clutching his bat.
Rather, there seems to be a general wariness from sprinters
regarding batons. Runners are cautious. Measured. Fearful.
“You have to respect them,” Angelo Taylor, a veteran
American relay runner, said of batons. Carmelita Jeter, who
is expected to be part of the women’s 4x100 team at the
Olympics, agreed. “You can’t assume anything in the relay,”
she said. “Anything — anything — can happen.”
Their trepidation is understandable. In a sport rooted in
individuality, the relay suddenly — awkwardly — demands
collaboration. Runners who spend their entire lives trying to
ruin the dreams of their competitors suddenly must share
them. Success and blame become a joint venture.
It is strange and uncomfortable, and that makes it more
embarrassing when things do not go right. Yes, the
Jamaican and British teams have had drops, too, including
a high-profile one by Britain recently at the European
championships, but it is not the same.
The history for United States relay teams is unmatched.
Since 1932, American women have won as many Olympic
gold medals in the 4x100 relay (nine) as all other countries
combined. Since 1920, the American men’s relay team has
won gold at 15 of the 21 Olympics held, with one of the six
misses coming because of the 1980 United States boycott of
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the Moscow Games.
Because of that tradition and because of the massive
disappointment that enveloped the teams four years ago,
the obvious question from millions of casual fans watching
on television this summer will be this:
How can something that seems so easy really be so hard?
A Carousel of Runners
Ask a group of athletes why Olympic baton passing is so
difficult, and you will hear a variety of theories. The one
aspect athletes cited almost universally in recent interviews
was chemistry.
“A lot of other countries are always practicing together,”
Felix, who was part of the 4x400-meter relay team that won
a gold medal in Beijing, said before the Penn Relays meet in
Philadelphia this spring. “We get the relay camps before the
Games and meets like this, but you never know if the same
people are going to be there at the end of the year.”
In most cases, that is by necessity. Unlike countries like
Italy and Poland, which are known for having more
dedicated relay-team training, the United States has a slew
of contenders for medals in the individual sprints. That
means there is continual turnover as athletes qualify for any
given competition in any given year, not to mention that the
individual sprints always take priority over the relays.
It is a reality often bemoaned by national team coaches.
Athletes have personal coaches and trainers, and those
people are responsible for making certain that the runners
are primed for their individual events. Only after those
events are over do the runners who have come through
uninjured fully turn their attention to the relays.
Asking the athletes to do otherwise would be
counterproductive, Felix said. No one wants to have a deep
discussion on passing technique or to practice baton
exchanges a day before the heats for individual events
begin.
“Everyone has their own schedules, their own agendas,”
Felix said. “These people that are on the relay team with us,
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they’re also our competitors. To get together with someone
and disrupt their agenda? That’s hard.”
The notion that the relays are, in many ways, just an
afterthought is a philosophical concern, but there is also a
more bureaucratic problem that afflicts the relays,
according to those involved in the process.
“There’s the Olympic Games, and then there’s Olympic
gaming,” said Brooks Johnson, a former coach of the United
States track team. The politics of which athletes end up
running in the relays can often play havoc with a team’s
composition and success, Johnson said.
Johnson refused to comment on specific instances, but
several are well known by runners. In 1996, Carl Lewis —
probably the best sprinter in American track history — did
not run in the relays after he refused to attend a
pre-Olympics training camp. One theory, which was voiced
by the Canadian star Donovan Bailey, was that Lewis, then
35, did not want to risk sullying his personal reputation by
running the anchor leg and losing. “Carl is a better
businessman than that,” Bailey said. The United States
went home with the silver.
Eight years later, Lewis was the one criticizing United States
track officials for what he perceived as odd relay selections
after Felix was left off the women’s 4x100 team. “It was a
mistake,” he said. Then, in 2008, questions were raised
about which leg of the relay Tyson Gay should have run
after he was part of a mishandled pass.
This is not a new phenomenon: some longtime track
observers still wonder why Florence Griffith-Joyner, on her
way to becoming the fastest woman in the world, was not
included on the 4x100 team at the 1984 Olympics.
Sometimes the conflict has to do with relationships between
athletes and coaches, Johnson said. Sometimes it has to do
with an athlete’s preference or health. Sometimes it is just a
coach or team official feeling the need to do something to
make an imprint on a team.
Whatever the reason, creating a relay team is rarely as
simple as taking the four fastest runners and putting them
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together.
“That’s what people don’t realize,” Johnson said. “Olympic
gaming is more decisive than whatever happens at the
actual Olympic Games.”
A Careful Calculation
Whatever a person’s feeling on the intangible aspect of the
baton pass, there is no disputing its complexity from a
physiological perspective. There are tense exchanges in the
4x400 relay, but the time pressure in the longer race is not
as pressing; only in the 4x100 does the pass come in a
crucible, leaving that race on an island in terms of the
precise skills needed for success.
First, some basics: the standard approach is for each team’s
leadoff runner to start with the baton in his or her right
hand. That runner stays on the inside of the lane nearing
the second runner, who waits until the leadoff runner
approaches and then starts sprinting inside a 10-meter fly
zone. At the end of the fly zone, a 20-meter passing zone
begins. The exchange must be made inside this area.
The leadoff runner places the baton in the second runner’s
left hand. The second runner runs that leg, hugging the
outside of the lane, and follows the same sequence in
passing to the third runner’s right hand. The third runner
then passes to the anchor’s left hand — this was where Gay
and Darvis Patton failed to connect in Beijing — and, if all
has gone right, everyone watches the last runner sprint to
the finish.
In other words, there are three exchanges in every race, and
each exchange must take place inside a 20-meter area. If a
runner goes outside his or her lane, or a pass takes place
outside the area, the team is disqualified.
“That’s why we do a lot of math,” Jeter said. “It’s a math
problem, and we have to get it right.”
The math arises a few days before each race. On every
track’s surface, there is a diamond or triangle indicating the
top of the fly zone, where a waiting runner should stand.
Teams then work from that mark backward, literally
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counting out steps, in an attempt to estimate the spot where
the action of the passing sequence should begin.
Before Jeter took the baton from Bianca Knight at the Penn
Relays, for example, the runners had plotted out a day
earlier the exact point on the track that Knight needed to
reach before Jeter would take off into the fly zone, marking
the spot with a piece of tape. Typically, Jeter said, two
Olympic-caliber female runners will start by pacing off 25
steps back from the triangle; they then run a test pass to see
if the movements match up smoothly.
If the pass happens too early in the zone, before the
outgoing runner has a chance to reach top speed, the pair
can move the piece of tape away from the fly zone and delay
the exchange a few steps. If the pass happens too late,
putting the outgoing runner perilously close to the end of
the 20-meter zone, then the piece of tape is moved the other
direction.
The spacing is critical because using a silent pass — as most
teams do in a loud stadium — involves having the receiving
runner put a hand back to accept the baton after a
predetermined number of steps. If the incoming runner is
not there (or gets there too soon), disaster ensues.
“You never get the magic number on the first try,” Jeter
said. “And you want to do it as close to the race as possible.
Doing it weeks early doesn’t help anyone because you don’t
know how someone will be running weeks later.”
Where is the absolute best spot for the exchange to take
place? Dr. Aki Salo, a senior lecturer in sport biomechanics
at the University of Bath in England, said his studies had
shown that teams should strive to make the handoff 15
meters into the 20-meter passing zone. Even later would be
better, Salo said, because then the outgoing runner could
reach a higher speed. But leaving five meters of room in case
of an awkward pass is prudent.
A fluid exchange can make the difference between a
successful race and disappointment. On a good pass, the
baton spends about 1.8 seconds in the zone, said Salo, who
has worked with Britain’s track team for more than a
decade. A bad pass might have the baton there for 2.0
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seconds. With three exchanges in each relay, poor passing
can cost a team half a second or more — an eternity in a
sport where finishes are often decided by hundredths of a
second.
At the 2007 world championships, Salo videotaped the
British relay team during the preliminary heats. After
analyzing the film, he noticed that two of the exchanges
came far too early in the 20-meter zone. After he consulted
with the team’s coaches, they suggested moving the tape on
the track.
“All of this makes an important difference,” Salo said. “In
the final, the guys ran almost 0.43 seconds faster. That was
enough to get them the bronze.”
Picking a Team
Last spring, Drummond was named the United States
relays coach and charged with reversing the negative
sentiment from Beijing. A personable character known
occasionally as the clown prince of track, Drummond has
significant relay experience: he was part of the 4x100 team
that won the gold at the 2000 Olympics, and he even
completed a pass after tearing a quadriceps muscle halfway
through a relay leg at the 2001 world championships.
Drummond is aware of the issues facing relay teams because
he has experienced them. His philosophy, he said, is rooted
in continuity, even though he knows it can be difficult to
find in relays.
Still, he will try. Drummond said that he would hold a
pre-Games relay camp at a location he refused to identify —
“to keep the pressure from outside off,” he said — and that
he planned to tell the invited runners on the first day who
his top four runners for each race were.
“Everyone shows up thinking they are on the team? No,” he
said. “They all might end up running, but I shoot straight.
Here is my team. Now you have to keep the spot.”
Drummond added that he planned to take 20 runners — 10
men and 10 women — to the camp but would cut each team
to six before the Games. He also vowed to shut out the
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standard back-room issues by maintaining a blunt approach
to personality concerns.
If there is any lingering issue between Jeneba Tarmoh and
Felix, for example, after their dead-heat finish at the
Olympic trials, Drummond will have no patience for it, he
said.
“That’s what destroys relays, when everyone starts thinking
and talking,” Drummond said. “I’m not dealing with agents
or coaches or any of that. If you have a problem, talk to your
agent. Talk to your coach. Talk to the team chaplain if you
need to.
“I don’t care if you don’t like each other,” he added. “I just
need you to like each other for these 40 seconds. Once she
passes that finish line, you can all go back to hating each
other. But for that split second, that 1.9 seconds between
that exchange pass? Y’all need to love each other like you’re
twin cousins.”
Drummond said he would also like to see a universal
approach to passing technique. One of the difficulties
coaches have found in the past is that each runner learned
passing a different way; some runners use the overhand
approach, slapping the baton down into the receiver’s hand
from above, while others learned the underhand sweep,
bringing the stick up from below.
To Drummond, there “should be a U.S.A. way,” and for now
that way is “the push,” he said. In that technique, incoming
runners literally push the baton forward, straight out in
front of them and into the outgoing runner’s outstretched
hand. Drummond also wants the outgoing runner’s arm to
be back and turned slightly out, a slight adjustment from
the norm, where runners hunch over and unnaturally throw
their hands behind them.
“That way it’s right in front of the incoming runner,”
Drummond said. “And no, we don’t slap the baton down. If
you slap it down and miss, it’s on the ground. If you
underhand and miss, it’s behind you. If you push it in and
miss, you just adjust. You can still make it happen.”
Drummond has strong connections to several of the runners
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in the relay pool for the London Games, including Gay,
whom he also coaches individually. The hope, Drummond
said, is that all the runners come through their individual
events healthy so there are choices to be made when it
comes to naming the relay team. The reality, however, is
that often the best-laid plans are spoiled by injuries.
At the world championships in 2007, “we knew who our
four was going to be in ample time,” Drummond recalled.
“But then one guy got hurt. And then our alternate got hurt,
and it was a duct-tape and Krazy Glue team.”
That team took the gold medal anyway. The United States
actually swept all four relay golds that year in Osaka, Japan,
raising expectations for a similar haul in Beijing a year later.
Instead, the Americans were left with only a few disastrous
pings on the track.
To some, there are concerns that a mental block is setting
in. Johnson, the former coach, said he worried about a
syndrome similar to the one that seemingly gripped the
women’s bracket at the 2009 United States Open in tennis.
At that event, double faults were the story of the early
rounds, as one competitor after another fell victim to the
seemingly simple second serve. It appeared as if the bug
were contagious.
Drummond, though, seems optimistic. He remains wary, if
not a bit paranoid, about how meet officials will judge the
United States if there is a questionable pass or a lane
dispute — “They err on the side of ‘how can we get them
out?’ ” he said — but he refuses to acknowledge any
overarching baton problem.
The United States has tremendous sprinters, he said. And it
is no secret what types of runners fit best in each leg. A
strong starter, like Justin Gatlin (or even Drummond) leads
off; a runner who can go a little extra distance, like Leroy
Burrell, follows at No. 2; then the strongest runner,
someone like Dennis Mitchell to handle the turn, comes
third; and a closer, like Maurice Greene or Lewis, finishes
up.
The talent is there, Drummond said. Mistakes just seem
more pronounced because the world knows the Americans’
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potential. It has always been that way, and it will be again in
London.
“We’ve got the history, and we’ve got the talent right now,”
Drummond said. “No one can deny that. We just need to get
the stick around. That’s it. We just need to get the stick all
the way around and win.”
A version of this article appeared in print on July 23, 2012, on page F12 of the
New York edition with the headline: Pass or Fail.
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