The Tribune

By RENALDO DORSETT

Sports Reporter

rdorsett@tribunemedia.net

The defending champions United States hosted their first practice session in the original Thomas A Robinson Stadium yesterday, as they began their quest to capture the golden baton for a second consecutive year.

Team USA will be led by former athletics star Dennis Mitchell as its head coach, and the 51-member team features 25 athletes who have won medals at global senior championships.

This year’s star-studded squad includes three of the four members of the world record women’s 4x100m team, the men’s 4x100m team with three of the four silver medallists from the 2012 Olympics and in the men’s 4x400m - three of four from the quartet that took home gold at the IAAF World Championships in Moscow.

“For the athletes to buy into the World Relays is a big issue because I’m a very young coach and I’ve been given a very big job,” Mitchell said. “So the athletes place their faith in me to come here and have me be able to manage this process and put them in the best positions to be successful is a great honour for me, but to have all this star power is a really, really exciting thing.”

Individually, the team will be highlighted by four-time Olympic gold medallists Allyson Felix and Sanya Richards-Ross, three-time Olympic medallist Carmelita Jeter and two of the fastest men in the history of track and field - Tyson Gay and Justin Gatlin.

Despite the star power, Mitchell said the team is cognizant of the fact that it is a team event and team dynamics can prove to be a deciding factor on the track this weekend.

“No matter who you put on the track there’s always an element of mistakes that can happen out there. Our goal is to put the best athletes on the track to get the job done, but if we don’t pass those sticks properly the end result is not going to be favourable to us,” he said. “So what we really want to focus on, what we want to do as a team and hopefully our outcomes will be favourable for what we want to accomplish.”

One of the more talked about rivalries in recent years has been the men’s 4x400m matchup between the USA and the Bahamas.

At the Penn Relays last weekend, the USA took the win in the latest chapter in a time of 3:00.86s while the Bahamas took second in 3:01.63s.

The Bahamas took a major step forward with the Golden Knights’ gold-medal finish at the 2012 London Olympics and a win at the 2014 Penn Relays. The Americans avenged those losses at the 2014 World Relays when LaShawn Merritt passed Michael Mathieu over the final 20m of the marquee race.

Mitchell said he expects another exciting chapter to add to the rivalry.

“To the outside person in, it looks like a rivalry, but these guys are all friends, they all know each other, they see each other every single year and they run against each other several times a year,” he said.

“For them it’s a friendly rivalry, but it’s very exciting, the guys really love to compete against each other and which ever team wins, the other team is very happy for them and we move on to the next race but it’s a very exciting thing to have a rivalry with the host country.”

The USA reached the podium in seven of the 10 relay events in Nassau last year, winning five of them, and was awarded the Golden Baton for amassing the most points in the scoring system.