World
Relays

A Championship Run Entirely in Teams

The World Athletics Relays is the one global championship where nobody competes alone: every race on the programme is a relay, every result belongs to a country, and the whole thing fits into two evening sessions. World Athletics created it in 2014 — the first edition ran on 24 and 25 May at the Thomas Robinson Stadium in Nassau, in the Bahamas — and has staged it eight times since, roughly every two years.

The map of hosts tells the story of the event's ambitions. Nassau staged the first three editions and a fourth in 2024. Yokohama took it to Asia in 2019, Chorzów's Silesian Stadium kept it alive through the pandemic spring of 2021 — a home weekend Poland fans still talk about — and Guangzhou brought it to China in 2025. In May 2026 Gaborone, Botswana made it the first global track championship ever held in Africa. Next stop: back to Nassau, 22 and 23 April 2028, the fifth time the Bahamian capital hosts.

Today's programme is six events: the classic 4×100 and 4×400 for men and women, plus the mixed 4×400 and the mixed 4×100. But the fixture's real power is not what gets raced — it is what the results decide.

The Weekend That Fills the Lanes

Since 2024, the World Relays has been the main gateway to every other relay final that matters. The mechanics are simple and brutal: finish in the top two of your heat and your country's lane at the next global championship is booked. Miss it, and you get exactly one more chance the following evening. Teams fly home either qualified or not.

The numbers make the point better than any description. At Nassau 2024, the top 14 teams in each of the five events took the Olympic lanes for Paris — out of fields of 16, leaving just two per event to the season's top lists. At Gaborone 2026, the split moved to 12 of 16, but across six events: 72 of the 96 relay places at the Beijing 2027 World Championships were settled in a single weekend in May.

Gaborone carried a second prize on top. The top six teams in each mixed relay also punched their ticket to the first Ultimate Championship in Budapest in September 2026 — Canada, Germany, Jamaica, Nigeria, Spain and the United States in the mixed 4×100; Great Britain, Italy, Jamaica, Kenya, Spain and the United States in the mixed 4×400. One race, two championships decided.

The Relay Laboratory

No other championship has rewritten its own programme this often, and that is by design: the World Relays is where World Athletics tries things. The 2014 edition ran ten events, including a 4×800 and a 4×1500 — and the very first night produced a world record that still stands, Kenya's 14:22.22 in the men's 4×1500 with Asbel Kiprop on the anchor, fourteen seconds under the old mark. Jamaica added a 4×200 world record of 1:18.63 with Yohan Blake closing.

In 2015 the 4×1500 gave way to the distance medley, and the United States promptly set both world records in it on the same night — 9:15.50 for the men, 10:36.50 for the women. Both are still the fastest ever run, largely because the event vanished from the programme two years later. The 4×800 followed it out in 2019, replaced by a 2×2×400 and a mixed shuttle hurdles relay that lasted two editions themselves.

One experiment outgrew the laboratory. The mixed 4×400 was raced for the first time anywhere at the 2017 World Relays — and the host Bahamas won it, Steven Gardiner and Shaunae Miller among the four, to the loudest roar Nassau produced all weekend. Two years later it was a World Championships event in Doha; a year after that, an Olympic one. The mixed 4×100 is now walking the same road: world debut at Guangzhou 2025, won by Canada, and a place already reserved at the Ultimate Championship and the Beijing Worlds.

The laboratory years also produced the fixture's great upsets — Brazil beating a Noah Lyles-led US quartet by 0.02 in Yokohama in 2019, Italy winning the mixed 4×400 and the women's 4×100 in Silesia in 2021, months before its Tokyo sprint triumphs.

Gaborone 2026: Africa Takes the Baton

The eighth edition was the one the record books will keep. Jamaica opened the weekend by breaking the mixed 4×100 world record in the heats — 39.99, the first time under 40 seconds — and closed it by breaking it again in the final: 39.62, with Ackeem Blake, Tina Clayton, Kadrian Goldson and Tia Clayton. The same evening, Elaine Thompson-Herah anchored Jamaica's women's 4×100 to gold in 42.00 — her first competition in Jamaican colours since 2023, after nearly two years out injured.

The last race of the weekend belonged to the hosts. Botswana — world champions in the event since Tokyo 2025, where Collen Kebinatshipi had also become the country's first male world champion over 400 m — won the men's 4×400 in front of their own crowd in 2:54.47, the third-fastest time ever run, behind only the United States' 2:54.29 world record from 1993 and its 2:54.43 from the Paris final. Letsile Tebogo ran in that quartet a year after leading Botswana to the same title in Nassau.

Even the runners-up made history. South Africa's silver carried the single fastest 4×400 leg ever recorded — 42.66 — taking down the 42.94 Michael Johnson had held since the Stuttgart Worlds of 1993. And in the women's 4×400, Norway won its first World Relays title in 3:20.96, a national record and world lead, with Henriette Jæger's 48.91 anchor the fastest split of the championship; Spain — the reigning champions from Guangzhou — took silver in a national record of their own.

From the Relays to the Olympic Podium

Follow the teams that qualified at Nassau 2024 into the Paris Games and the fixture's weight becomes obvious. The men's 4×100 podium in Paris — Canada, South Africa, Great Britain — was three nations that had punched their tickets at the World Relays in May.

Great Britain turned its Nassau qualifications into a medal in all five relay events — the full story of that haul is in our Great Britain 2024 season post. The Netherlands won the Paris mixed 4×400 final in a European record 3:07.43, covered in the Netherlands 2024 post — two days after the United States had set the world record of 3:07.41 in the heats.

And the United States remains the fixture's reference point. Through 2025 the Americans have taken 38 World Relays medals, 27 of them gold — more than any other nation — and won the Golden Baton, the trophy for the best overall team, at each of the first four editions. The men's 4×400 world record of 2:54.29, set at the 1993 Stuttgart Worlds, has now outlived every challenge for more than three decades — including Botswana's home masterpiece in Gaborone.

Federation Kit, Nothing Else

Here is the house rule of this series applied to its purest case: championships mean federation kit, leagues and meetings mean sponsor kit. The World Relays is the federation-kit event taken to its logical end — there are no individual entries at all, so every single baton pass happens in national team colours. The Nike USA kit in the American exchanges, the adidas pieces on other federations, the 4F of a Polish quartet: that is the entire visual language of the weekend.

Federation kit · in the archiveAdidas Great Britain Pro Elite 2024 Running CapTeam-issue adidas Great Britain piece from the 2024 cycle — the season Britain turned its Nassau qualifications into a medal in all five Olympic relay events.90,00 €View piece →

That is why this page points at the nations archive. Start with the United States — the fixture's dominant force — or with Jamaica, its record-breaker in Gaborone, and the rails below hold one athlete-issued piece per federation.