High School Relay Team Uses High Jump Pole Instead Of Baton, Wins

The 4 x 100 meter race is about pure, raw speed, but it also takes a good deal of coordination to time your handoffs right. This is much easier if you have a dang high jump bar to hand off instead of a tiny, near-weightless baton.

The members of Fairfax High’s B-team caught up with LetsRun.com and confirmed that they thought it would be funny to go out on Senior Night by running with a big spear:

“It was actually Senior Night and we wanted to do something fun and just have a blast that night,” said Te’Ona Witherspoon, a senior on the Fairfax track team. “And we were just like, ‘What’s something different that other teams don’t really do?’ And we were like, ‘Let’s run a 4×1 with a pole.’

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No one expected Fairfax to actually win. Though Te’Ona and Erin are both members of the Fairfax 4×100 team that qualified for states, they had essentially no recovery before this race as they had both run on a different 4×100 team in the first heat just moments before. And, you know, they were passing a high jump bar.

I wish the IAAF would make relay teams pass around a different mystery object for each relay.