🇺🇸 Dillon Mitchell

The second leg of a 4x100m is the longest run in the race. Where the lead-off runner covers a little under a hundred metres and the anchor a little over, the two middle legs are run flat out down the back straight with a baton received in motion and handed on in motion. There is no start, no finish line and no crowd noise cue — just an acceleration mark on the track, a shout, and the requirement to be at top speed at both ends of the leg. It is the least visible job in sprinting and the one most often blamed when a record attempt fails.

The record the American quartet broke, 38.51, had been set by South Africa when winning the world U20 title in Nairobi in 2021. Under-20 relay records survive for years because they require a coincidence that no programme can manufacture on demand: four sprinters of near-senior standard, born inside the same two-year window, in the same country, with enough time together before a championship to make the exchanges automatic. Most junior quartets are assembled in the days before a heat.

Eugene delivered the coincidence. Tate Taylor, the anchor, had already won the 100 metres on the Thursday and the 200 metres on the Saturday, and the relay completed an 18-year-old's gold treble at the championships. Blake Hamilton had taken silver behind him in the 200. Kyler Brown, describing the squad afterwards, said simply: "This is a fast team; we never had a thing like this before." That is the accurate summary — the record came from four legs and three clean exchanges rather than from a single spectacular effort.

Behind the Americans, Great Britain and Northern Ireland finished in 38.90 for silver, matching the European U20 record; Jamaica took bronze in 39.01, a second medal of the championships for Gary Card, who had taken silver in the 100 metres. Both marks would have been strong enough to win most previous editions of the event, which puts the American time in context: this was not a soft race won by default.

The relay closed a championships in which the United States finished top of the medal table with 12 golds, seven silvers and five bronzes. The men's 4x400m, the final event, produced a second American relay victory in a world U20 lead of 3:01.39 — the fifth-fastest under-20 performance in history — with Quincy Wilson, Cameron Tucker, Alexander Osayemi and Jayden Deleon defending the title for the third successive time. Hayward Field, rebuilt for the 2022 senior World Championships, has become one of the fastest tracks in the sport.

Published coverage of the 4x100m concentrated, as relay coverage usually does, on the anchor leg and the record. What is documented about Dillon Mitchell from Oregon is precise and worth stating plainly: he ran the second leg of the fastest 4x100m relay ever run by an under-20 team, and the exchange he took and the exchange he gave were both good enough to hold a record pace. In an event decided in the handover zones, that is the whole of the job.