The relay is lost in the first metre of the zone

Four fast men keep losing to four slightly slower ones, and the reason is almost never the baton itself.

Drop the baton and everyone sees it. That is the failure people remember, and it is the least interesting one, because a drop is usually just a bad day. The expensive failures are silent. A team runs four excellent legs, hands over cleanly every time, and still finishes behind a squad with worse individual times. Nothing looked wrong. Something was.

The changeover zone is not a place where you pass a stick. It is a place where you are trying to keep two people moving at nearly the same speed for long enough to make the transfer without either of them slowing down. That is the whole event. If the outgoing runner starts too late he gets caught from behind and has to hold back. If he starts too early he runs out of zone and has to wait. Both look like a clean exchange on television. Both cost you.

What decides it is the go mark, and the go mark is where I think most squads are lazy. It gets set in training, on a warm afternoon, on a good surface, with everybody fresh. Then it gets used in a final at nine in the evening in a headwind after three rounds. The incoming runner is arriving a fraction slower than he did in April because he has raced twice that day. The mark has not moved. So the outgoing runner leaves on schedule and the gap closes too fast.

There is a habit I would like to see die, which is treating the go mark as a team constant. It belongs to a pair, not to a squad. It depends on how fast that specific incoming runner is still travelling at that specific point in his leg, which is a different question from how fast he is over the whole hundred. A sprinter who holds his top speed well and a sprinter who is fading arrive at the same line at very different velocities. Giving them the same mark is the same mistake as giving two athletes the same block spacing.

The other thing nobody drills enough is the first metre after the go. Most outgoing runners accelerate as though they were leaving blocks, which is wrong, because there are no blocks and there is a man arriving behind them at close to eleven metres a second. You need a hard, committed first two steps and then a settle. Half of the exchanges I watch have a hesitant opening stride, and that hesitation is the whole margin.

Practise it tired. Practise it into a wind. Set the mark for the pair and reset it when either of them changes shape. It is unglamorous and it is worth more than another winter of top-end speed work.