Canada shocks Paris Olympics with 4×100-metre relay gold

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Published August 9, 2024 at 3:27 pm

Andre De Grasse

After a week where everything that could go wrong did, it all went right in a hurry Friday when the Canadian men’s 4×100-metre relay team shocked the track world by winning Olympic gold, with Andre De Grasse earning his seventh career Olympic medal with a blazing fast 8.89 second anchor leg.

De Grasse failed to final in either the 100 metres or 200 metres (where he was the defending Olympic champion) and saw his personal coach kicked out of the games as well. Teammates Aaron Brown, Jerome Blake and Brendon Rodney also had little to show for their Olympic experience until Friday’s relay final.

The Canadians just barely qualified for the final eight and were running in the less-than-desirable outside lane. But the Canadian men eliminated one race favourite in the Jamaicans in the semi-final and the Americans botched a handoff in the final, leaving the field wide open and ripe for an upset.

And De Grasse and company took full advantage. After a bit of a messy first exchange between Brown and Blake, the next two exchanges were clean and De Grasse was fire on the anchor leg to win gold, finishing 7/100ths of a second ahead of South Africa. Great Britain in 37.61 took third.

De Grasse, the pride of Markham who trains at The Speed Academy in Pickering, is now tied with swimmer Penny Oleksiak as Canada’s all-time most decorated Olympian.

This quartet is on the Olympic podium for the second straight Games after winning silver at Tokyo three years ago. De Grasse, Rodney and Brown previously earned bronze at Rio 2016 as well.

Brown, Blake, Rodney, and De Grasse also won gold at the 2022 World Athletics Championships in Eugene, Oregon.

Whether De Grasse sticks around for Los Angeles in 2028 – when he would be 33 – is a question for another day. Today, he and Rodney, Blake and Brown are Olympic champions.

This is Canada’s fifth Olympic medal all-time in the men’s 4x100m relay. They won gold in Atlanta in 1996 with a squad that included 100-metre gold medallist Donovan Bailey, Bruny Surin (Team Canada’s Paris 2024 Chef de Mission), Glenroy Gilbert (the current national team head coach) and Robert Esmie and Carlton Chambers.

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