Think of a relay. Likely what springs to mind is a team of four athletes trying to get their baton around the track as fast as possible.
Maybe it’s the jostling of the waiting athletes at the exchange in the 4x400m or the the jeopardy of trying to make a clean hand over in the 4x100m.
Relays are not just about speed, they require accuracy, smooth transition, and team work.
Relays have been a key fixture of athletics meetings for a long time, but they haven’t always been in the format we know them now. At the first international women’s athletics tournament the Jeux Olympiques Féminins (1921 Women’s Olympiad) held in Monte Carlo in 1921, there were two relay distances; 4x75m and 4x175m, owing to the short length of the track.
The 1928 Olympics in Amsterdam saw a men’s 4x100m and 4x400m relay, and a women’s 4x100m relay. Interestingly, it was after this Olympic Games, the first at which women had been permitted to compete in athletics, that the IAAF took the decision that women athletes would not run distances greater than 200m. This decision meant that it took until 1969 to see the first international 4x400m women’s relay, run at the European Championships, with the first Olympic 4x400m women’s relay at the 1972 Munich Games.
It is not just distances which have changed over the history of this event. Batons were first used in 1893, but the defined exchange zones for the 4x100m relay were not introduced until 1926.
More recently, the introduction of the mixed relay in 2019 has seen teams made up of two male and two female athletes competing. Initially teams could choose who they put on each leg, but since 2022 it has been fixed so that the first and third legs are run by men and the second and fourth are run by women.