Rhasidat Adeleke plays starring role in breaking of three US collegiate records

Never in the 95 editions of the famed Texas Relays has the home university celebrated a weekend like this one, with Rhasidat Adeleke playing a starring role in the breaking of three different American collegiate records over the final two days of competition.

Nor has any Irish athlete been celebrated here like this before, Adeleke named joint winner of the outstanding women athlete of the entire meeting along with team-mate Julien Aflred. Both athletes had left heads turning in every sense.

Her popularity, reputation and performances all soaring, the Dublin sprinter, into her third year at the University of Texas at Austin, was competing outdoors for the first time this season – and the rest of it can’t come fast enough.

In all Adeleke raced five times in four different relay events, and Texas won them all – starting with the sprint medley on Friday evening, then the 4x200m, 4x100m, and finally the 4x400m on Saturday, where Adeleke ran the anchor winning leg much to the delight of the home crowd. Her coach Edrick Floréal recorded a split time of 49.2 seconds, the fastest of the still 20 year-olds life.

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“Yeah that was it, our goal was to win every single relay, break to collegiate record, and we did exactly that,” said Adeleke, confidence soaring too in the richly talented environs of Austin.

“The 4x100m, that’s the record we’ve been chasing since last season, so to get it in out first meet, and with one day of actual relay work, in our spikes, on Tuesday. That’s really impressive. That’s a huge record to get, and in our first meet, It just gives us the confidence now through the outdoor season.”

The highlight was unquestionably that 4x100m, raced midway through the schedule on Saturday: Adeleke and team-mate Alfred ran on all three NCAA collegiate-record breaking quartets, joined on this one by Ezinne Abba and Kevona Davis; with Adeleke on the third leg, they finished in 42.00 seconds flat, bettering the 42.05 of Louisiana in 2018.

Just 90 minutes earlier, the 4x200m quartet of Alfred, Adeleke, Lanae-Tava Thomas and Kevona Davis ran a time of 1:28.05, improving the previous collegiate record set by Oregon in 2017, 1:28.78.

On Friday evening, in the sprint medley (200m-200m-400m-800m) Adeleke ran the second leg in 21.7 leg, Kennedy Simon running a 49.9 400m split, before Valery Tobias anchored for the winning time of 3:36.10, over two seconds faster than the previous mark.

First staged in 1925, in part response to cold-weather conditions at the Kansas Relays, the event attracts some 50,000 spectators across four days, bringing some 5,000 student and professional athletes from across the US, staged at the 20,000-seater Mike A. Myers Stadium northwest of the campus.

Rhasidat’s 49.2 split improved her 49.4 from the European Championships in Munich last August, despite it being her third race on Saturday: “Yeah, I did feel some fatigue, but I feel that drive for the team just helped push me down the track, kind of game me that element of atmosphere not to get too fatigued,” she added, the 17,000 in attendance on Saturday certainly all behind her.

“But at the end of the day that’s my job, to protect our home, this is our track, that’s my job regardless of what it takes. It’s big thing for the programme, to be able to have so many successful athletes, helps with recruiting, and I’m just really happy to be able to put on a show.

“It was a lot of running, but we won every single relay, broke three collegiate records, so really happy, really satisfied sprints wise we’re all very close, competing at such a high level.

Coach Floréal, better known as Coach Flo and a two-time Olympian, ranked it as his finest moment in his coaching career.

“Three collegiate records, here, is probably one of the greatest feats I’ve ever been part of,” he said. “If you get one collegiate record it’s like ‘wow’, get two, it’s like what’s going on. But three? And those were the three we wanted to get, so it’s not accidental.”

In the fourth and final relay win, in the Sanya Richards-Ross 4x400 relay from Thomas, Simon, Alfred and Adeleke defeated NCAA indoor champions Arkansas with a time of 3:23.27; it also ranks as the second-fastest time in Texas history, and saw Adeleke get the better of Arkansas runner Britton Wilson on the last leg, the American who beat her to the NCAA indoor title last month.

“And it was more of a guarded split,” Flo said of Adeleke’s split. “Because she was looking at the screen, to see where the girl was, as opposed to running her race. But she broke her spirit, in the first 250m, by going out so hard, in 22.2. At that rate it’s over.

“And the women were aware of it, and the one thing I’m more pleased with is they started producing them like a machine. They knew what they had to do, everybody did their part, and nobody complained or wined about anything.

Adeleke’s success in her opening outdoor meeting comes just three weeks after she went where no Irish athlete has gone before, a first individual medal in an NCAA sprint event, nailing second place in one of the fastest indoor 400 metres of all-time.

There, Wilson, at age 22, took the win in 49.48 seconds, somewhat aided by the high altitude, and which only a few weeks ago would have been the world record. Then came Adeleke in 50.45, equalling her second-fastest time ever, and effectively run solo in the second final. That was her only indoor loss all season, after she improved her own 200m record to 22.52 seconds, before first running 50.45 in the 400m, faster than her own outdoor mark of 50.53, improving it again that 50.33.