SAINT-DENIS, France — On the final night of competition at the Stade de France, the Americans torched the purple track in their relays, setting a pair of records and pulling off another gold medal sweep in the men’s and women’s events.
It’s the third straight Olympics both U.S. 4×400-meter teams have won gold medals. For the women, it has now been more than 30 years since they didn’t capture gold in the event.
“We got the real quarter horses,” women’s lead leg Shamier Little said. “We really do. And it’s amazing to be part of history, and to kind of add on to that. To see the dominance lay before you, and then fall in line with that.”
Such dominance was on full display Saturday in the middle of the women’s relay, when Little handed the baton off before any other team’s first leg. When she put the stick in Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone’s hands, the race was effectively over.
McLaughlin-Levrone, the 25-year-old now four-time gold medalist hurdler who seemingly gets faster every time she’s on the track, sprinted hard into the first turn. Almost instantly, she created a massive gap between Team USA and the competition.
McLaughlin-Levrone’s spot in the lineup was a topic of conversation before and after the race. Although she’s a mainstay in the 4×400 relay, she typically runs the last leg. What accounted for the change?
“It was kind of a joint decision between me and the coaches,” McLaughlin-Levrone said. “I just knew that if that was the case I just had to do my job.
“We all knew it was going to look a little unconventional, but we knew that if we did our parts we were going to be fine.”
McLaughlin-Levrone paced the entire field, running the lowest split of the relay at 47.71 seconds. That was .91 of a second faster than Femke Bol, who took the Netherlands to silver.
After McLaughlin-Levrone, 200-meter champion Gabby Thomas followed. She increased the distance even further. Alexis Holmes capped the first-place finish in 3:15.27 — more than four seconds faster than the Dutch in second.
The time was a new American record and fell just 0.10 seconds shy of the Olympic and world record set by the Soviet Union at the 1988 Games.
“Relays, you never know what could happen,” Holmes said. “But once I saw Shamier’s first leg, I said, ‘We’re good.'”
For the American men, it was an Olympic record that fell in a much closer race.
With a 2:54.43 showing, they dashed around the track nearly a full second faster than the Americans did at the 2008 Olympics in Beijing, when the last record was set.
Saturday’s time also was just 0.14 seconds shy of surpassing the world record Team USA set at the 1993 world championships in Stuttgart, Germany.
The Americans needed every bit of their record-setting time. As Botswana and 200-meter champion Letsile Tebogo breathed down their necks, the focus for anchor Rai Benjamin was on managing a technically sound lap.
“It was probably my most calculated anchor leg that I’ve ever run, since I’ve been anchoring this relay the past couple years,” Benjamin said. “I couldn’t get out too hot, and I couldn’t get out too slow. Because the kid [Tebogo] runs a 19.4 [in the 200]. And you just don’t play around with people like that that run 19.4.”
Near the lap’s end, Benjamin held a narrow lead down the final straightaway. He leaned through the line first, though, edging Tebogo by 0.10 seconds. Benjamin’s 43.18-second lap was Team USA’s fastest.
Benjamin said the Botswana runners were playing mind games in the holding room prior to the race. They kept switching positions and changing up their order, so the other teams wouldn’t know which leg they were running.
When it came to the Americans’ order, Benjamin was joined by Chris Bailey, Vernon Norwood and Bryce Deadmon. Bailey moved into the lead position, taking over for 16-year-old Quincy Wilson, who ran in the preliminary the day before.
“I wanted to run for Quincy,” the 32-year-old Norwood said, “because he put out a significant amount of effort for us [Friday] and that gave me a lot of motivation to try to do my best out there.”
The 34 track medals are the most for the U.S. at a non-boycotted Games since the early 20th century, when there were more events and fewer countries. The 14 golds are the most in a non-boycotted Olympics since Bob Beamon, Tommie Smith and John Carlos led the U.S. to 15 in 1968.
The U.S. earlier equaled its medal total of 32 from the Rio Games when high jumper Shelby McEwen won a surprise silver medal after losing a drawn-out tiebreaker to New Zealand’s Hamish Kerr, who celebrated by diving into the thankfully inactive javelin landing zone.
The Associated Press contributed to this story.
