Penn
Relays

A Carnival, Not a Championship

The Penn Relays are a three-day relay meet run by the University of Pennsylvania at Franklin Field in Philadelphia every April since 1895. They are billed as the oldest and largest track and field meet in the United States, and the programme is built the other way round from a championship: hundreds of relay races for high schools, colleges and clubs, from first-year school squads to Olympic medallists, with the professionals squeezed into a few prime-time slots on the last afternoon.

The 2026 meet, held from 23 to 25 April, was the 130th. Organisers put the field at more than 20,000 competitors over the three days; Penn's own figure was nearly 20,000, and in a typical year the count passes 15,000. The races that matter most are the Championship of America events, a name the top high school and college relays have carried since the 1911 carnival. Their winners take home the Wheel, a bronze plaque on a wooden base, and teams cross the country, and the Caribbean, to win one.

130 Carnivals in 132 Years

The first carnival, in April 1895, opened Franklin Field itself. About 5,000 people watched nine relays, every one of them over 4×440 yards and with two teams in each, and Harvard beat Penn in the college championship. Until the NCAA held its first national championships in 1921, the Relays were the one meet that brought college athletes from every part of the country to the same track. The NCAA story is in our guide to the NCAA Championships.

What sets Penn apart is the run. The carnival went ahead through two world wars and the Depression. It stopped only in 2020, when Penn cancelled it on 16 March as the pandemic reached Philadelphia, the first time in its history, and again in 2021, when local limits on large gatherings were still in force. It came back in 2022, and the count reached 130 editions in April 2026.

USA vs the World

On the Saturday, the carnival makes room for national teams. The USA vs the World races put American relay squads against Jamaica and the other relay nations in the 4×100, the 4×400 and the medley events, and they are the reason the stands fill. On Saturday 24 April 2010, 54,310 people came to Franklin Field, the biggest single-day crowd in the meet's history, beating the 50,827 of 2002; the three days drew 117,346, also a record.

Most of them had come for one runner. Usain Bolt took the baton on the last leg of the 4×100 for Jamaica Gold, with Mario Forsythe, Yohan Blake and Marvin Anderson ahead of him, and brought it home in 37.90, a carnival record that afternoon and two hundredths inside the 37.92 run by an American team the year before. Five years earlier, Allyson Felix had led off the US women's sprint medley with a 200 m leg, and the team set a world best for the event. Both have since retired; the relay programme that brings national teams together each spring now also has a global championship of its own, told in our guide to the World Athletics Relays.

The Jamaican Penn Relays

No country outside the United States has made Penn its own like Jamaica. In 1963 Herb McKenley, the Olympic 4×400 champion of 1952 and by then president of Jamaica's athletics association, watched Kingston College dominate the national championships and told its coach, Donovan Davis, to take the team to Philadelphia. Kingston College went in 1964, the first Jamaican school at the Relays. McKenley died in 2007; the trip he pushed for became an annual migration: by the mid-2010s Jamaica was bringing more than 400 athletes every April. In 2014, for the fiftieth anniversary, Penn granted Kingston College the right to fly its flag at every future carnival, and in 2024 it marked sixty years of Jamaican schools at Franklin Field.

The 2026 carnival showed both sides of it. In the boys' 4×100 Championship of America, run on a cold, wet final day, Jamaica College won in 40.03 with Kai Kelly on the anchor leg and Kingston College second. In the boys' 4×400, Bullis School of Potomac, Maryland, anchored by Quincy Wilson, an Olympic 4×400 gold medallist from Paris 2024, became the first American school to win the title since 2007, in a race long dominated by Jamaican schools. On the college side, Ohio State won the men's 4×100 in 39.56, its first Penn title in the event since 1932, and added the 4×400. Texas A&M took the women's 4×100 in 43.88.

School Colours and Federation Kit

That makes Penn a federation-kit weekend. The American squads wear the USATF issue Nike has made for the national teams since 1991, the kit told in our history of athletics in the USA and our history of Nike Pro Elite. Jamaica races in its own federation colours. The athlete-issued versions of national kit, the Pro Elite pieces made for team members and not for the shops, are what the rail below holds, one federation per piece.

Federation kit · in the archiveNike USA Team Pro Elite 2026 Women Storm Fit JacketTeam-issue Nike USA Storm-Fit jacket from the 2026 cycle — the layer for an April meet that can turn cold and wet, as the last day of the 130th carnival did.240,00 €View piece →