It's not 100m, 4X100m is the fastest race

Which is the fastest race of the Olympics? You are wrong if you think it's the men 100m sprint. The event might be the yardstick to decide planet's fastest man but it is not the fastest race. In terms of speed the men 4X100m is always faster than the 100m race.In the 2012 Olympics Usain Bolt clocked 9.63s to finish the 100m sprint. The time taken by the four sprinters of Jamaican 4X100m was 36.84s. Evidently the average time taken by each athlete to finish 100 m was 9.21 sec- much faster than Bolt's 9.63s. Similarly in Beijing games the timetaken by Bolt to finish 100m was 9.69 sec while he ran much faster in 4X100m inwhich the average time taken by each athlete to complete 100m was 9.28s. Was oneof his teammates running faster than Bolt? The answer is everyone except thestarter was running faster than Bolt. Even Bolt clocked lesser time than his100m run. Tounderstand the anomaly one has to understand the mechanics of sprinting and how100m race is different from 4X100m relay. If we analyse the spilt timings ofUsain Bolt's world record performance in Berlin it becomes clear that theslowest part of a 100m sprint is the first 10m. In the 2009 race Bolt was slowest in the first 10m which he finished in 1.89 seconds. He finished the next 10m in 0.99s- half of the time taken to finish the first split. Similarly Powel, also running in the race, was slowest in the first 10m which he finished in 1.87 seconds. Both Bolt and Powel took less than a second to finish each of the remaining 9 splits. So what happens in the next 10 meters? Does the athlete slow down considerably or he maintains his speed? Now looking at Michael Johnson's splits for his world record performance it appears that it's easy to maintain the speed once the athlete has accelerated. Johnson finished first 10m in 1.766 seconds, 10th in 0.873s and 11th in 0.88s. He completed his12th and 13th split in 0.889s and 0.893s respectively. Looking at these numbersone can see that the first 10m is the slowest while there is no significantdifference in the athletes speed in the 11th, 12th and the 13th split. 4X100mrelay exploits these basics of sprinting mechanism and that's why the averagetiming is better than 100m race. In a typical 4X100m relay anathlete runs more than 100 meters. For the three outgoing athletes who willreceive the baton the track is divided into two zones- a 10m acceleration zoneand a subsequent 20m changeover zone in which the baton is handed over. Allbaton receivers put a check mark and starts acceleration once the baton carrierhits it. The baton is typically exchanged 5m before the end of the changeoverzone. Various estimates indicate that the first athlete runs for 105m while thenext two run 125m before exchanging the baton.