Canada aims to prove gold was no fluke

Men’s 4x100 relay team eyes a repeat win over U.S. rivals

Canada’s 4x100-metre men’s relay team thrilled Canadians and shocked Americans last summer by winning gold at the track and field world championships in Eugene, Ore.

It was the first global gold for a Canadian sprint team since 1997. The U.S. men had been the heavy favourites after sweeping the podium in the individual 100- and 200metre races.

That championship team of Andre De Grasse, Aaron Brown, Jerome Blake and Brendon Rodney is together again at the Florida Relays in Gainesville this week with one thought: doing it again.

There’s no resting on laurels because there’s “more” that needs doing, said Brown, who ran the leadoff leg for the team’s win in Oregon and its Olympic silver in Tokyo.

“We can run a faster time, lower our Canadian record even further,” the 30-year-old Toronto sprinter said. “And sometimes doing more is just repeating what you did the first time, you know, just proving that it wasn’t a fluke.

“Some people might say, ‘Oh, well, you won because of this or that,’ but if you repeat it, and you prove yourself again and again, then no one can really take that away from you.”

The U.S. team had a messy baton exchange on the final handover at last year’s world championships and Marvin Bracy couldn’t hold off De Grasse, who ran a sensational anchor leg to bring the Canadians across the line in 37.48 seconds, 0.07 ahead of the Americans. “Not being clean cost us the race,” Bracy said afterward.

The Canadian team had good exchanges — a skill they’ve practised for years — but they had plenty of challenges before getting to that start line.

De Grasse had a rocky season, dealing with a foot injury and contracting COVID-19 for the second time just before the championships. He didn’t advance to the 100 final and withdrew entirely from the 200, the event he won at the Tokyo Olympics. Blake was suffering from a serious but undiagnosed back injury and didn’t make the final in his individual sprints. Rodney missed the Canadian championships a few weeks earlier because of a hamstring injury. And Brown, who raced through the heats, semis and finals of the 100 and 200, was on his eighth race of the championships in the relay final.

But the group has proven to be greater than the sum of its parts, winning multiple Olympic and world medals by beating teams that, on paper, should have been faster. De Grasse, Brown and Rodney have been running relays together since 2015, and Blake joined the group in 2019. Now that they’re world champions, “there’s a target on our backs,” said Rodney, a 30year-old from Toronto. “Everybody wants to beat us; America wants to beat us, for sure.”

The first chance comes at the Florida Relays, with races starting Friday. The Canadians arrived earlier in the week for a training camp.

“Are they capable of going faster? Absolutely,” Athletics Canada head coach Glenroy Gilbert said. “But running faster isn’t just saying I want to run faster, it’s attention to the little details, the little nuances.”

One of the first orders of business will be parsing video of the team’s win last summer. “Our plan is to go through the race, look at each zone and look at the guys and kind of talk through what was going on in that space and time,” Gilbert said. “It’s definitely an opportunity to get better.”

The relay is a notoriously unpredictable event, so much so that stacked American and Jamaican teams — even in Usain Bolt’s era — have found themselves beaten by athletes who don’t break 10 seconds over 100 metres in individual races. Rare is the relay race that doesn’t have disqualifications for athletes passing the baton outside the allotted zone, stepping on the inside lane or dropping the baton entirely.

“You’re on a razor’s edge when it comes to performance … there’s lots of risk,” said Gilbert, who was a member of Canada’s winning relays in the 1990s.

This group has developed something that helps mitigate some of those risks: trust in each other. The order doesn’t always stay the same, but lately Blake has run the second leg, receiving the baton from Brown and handing off to Rodney.

“In a nutshell, it’s just focus on the mark, take off at the right time and run fast,” said Blake, a 27-year-old from Kelowna, B.C. “But there’s a level of trust that comes in, that when you run into the other guy he’s going to be there.”

A couple of Canadian traits have served to keep this group running together.

De Grasse, Canada’s individual star, values the team event and makes the time to attend training camps and relay competitions outside of the major events. “I’m definitely looking forward to getting back together,” the 28-year-old from Markham said.

And, so far, there’s been little push from up-and-comers to force turnover on the Canadian team. “Our pool of top-notch sprinters is very, very small,” Gilbert said, noting just 10 male sprinters were invited to the relay training camp. “We’re in athletics, sprinting, not hockey where you’ve got all these bodies available to you.”