COACH TONY FUSCO ASKS: “MY MIDDLE SCHOOL KIDS GET THE BATON AROUND THE TRACK; WHY CAN’T THESE GUYS?”

COACH TONY FUSCO ASKS:
“MY MIDDLE SCHOOL KIDS
GET THE BATON AROUND THE TRACK;
WHY CAN’T THESE GUYS?”
BY ELLIOTT DENMAN

Tony Fusco, my good friend, taught and coached at Eatontown, New Jersey’s middle school for years and years.,

He had a lot of success, too.

In the classroom and on the track.

(Eatontown is a feeder school for Monmouth Regional High School, which has sent two Golden Falcon grads, 1976 400 hurdler Quentin Wheeler and 1984 high jumper Milton Goode, to the Olympic Games.)

Tony Fusco’s young relay runners racked up many big wins and quick times along the way.

And they got the baton around the track – in both the 4×100 and 4×440 (yards that is), which evolved into the 4×100 and 4×400 (meters, that is.)

And, just like a few zillion other Paris Olympics-watchers, he was flummoxed to see the Team USA 4×100 men definitively botch it up – on the very first exchange of the final, no less, Christian Coleman to Kenny Bednarek.

Bednarek started too soon, had to put on the brakes, and USA medal hopes evaporated. Kyree King and anchor Fred Kerley ran sizzling legs….to no avail.

It was a flub, just as so many of their 21st-century predecessors have flubbed, too.

“Just can’t understand this happening….again…and again…and yet again,” Tony Fusco told me.

“What’s the big problem? My middle school kids get the stick around the track. Why can’t these guys? They’re supposed to be pros.”

Another New Jerseyan chimed in on the subject…with a bit more vehemence.

Said Willingboro’s own Olympic icon, Carl Lewis:

“It is time to blow up the system. This continues to be completely unacceptable. It is clear that everyone at USA Track and Field is more concerned with relationships than winning. No athlete should step on the track and run another relay until this program is changed from top to bottom.”

Five Games were held between the two World Wars and Team USA was brilliant in each.

In 2024, Canada (37.50) took the gold over South Africa and Great Britain.

Take note: (A) Team USA (running with a Coleman-Kerley-King-Courtney Lindsey lineup) had won its semifinal the day before in 37.4; (B) Noah Lyles’s Covid announcement scrambled all revised-lineup plans. (C) Team GB included U. of Houston coach Lewis’s star, Louie Hinchcliffe.
This big debate, of course, is not late-breaking news.

The 4×100 joined the Olympic program in 1912 and right off the bat, Team USA flubbed that one, too. An out-of-the zone pass erased an apparent 42.2 semifinal…