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How do you decide relay order: fastest leadoff or fastest anchor?

The fastest four people run a slower relay than the right four people in the right order, because a baton exchange rewards different things on each leg.

Every coach eventually lines up four sprinters by hand time and discovers the relay still did not go the way the arithmetic promised. Order is not a ranking problem. Each leg asks a different question, and hand time answers none of them.

What each leg actually needs

• Leadoff: a clean reaction off the gun and the confidence to run an full lane alone, since this is the only leg with no incoming runner to time off.
• Second leg: the best hands on the team, because this exchange happens at speed on a bend and a dropped or late baton here costs more than raw pace gains back.
• Third leg: often the strongest turn runner, since this leg is usually run into and out of the curve and curve-running is its own skill, not the same as straight speed.
• Anchor: the competitor, not automatically the fastest sprinter. The anchor runs last with the result in view and has to close a gap or hold one under pressure, which is a temperament question as much as a speed one.

Fastest-to-slowest puts your best sprinter on a leg, leadoff, where raw speed matters least and reaction matters most, and risks your worst exchange on a leg where losing the baton for half a second is the whole race.

Why splits lie about this

A relay split looks faster than the same athlete's open time because every leg after the first starts from a run, not from blocks. That gap is biggest for an athlete who accelerates slowly from a stand but is dangerous once moving, which is exactly the profile worth testing on a leg with an incoming runner to match speed with rather than leadoff, where the start itself is the event.

The only way to know who actually profiles where is to time it, not guess from the 100m sheet. Practice exchanges as full legs, back to back with no rest between them using StatLap's Workout page in laps mode, and the pattern across a few weeks usually settles the leadoff-versus-anchor argument better than any opinion does.

This is a lineup decision, not something a camera settles. The Film Room can show you how a given exchange looked frame by frame once you already know who is running where; it has no opinion on who should run which leg, because that is tactics, not technique.

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