The Drake Relays: Where America Learned to Run

In late April every year, Drake Stadium on the west side of Des Moines fills with the best track and field athletes in the United States. Some of them are high school students. Some are collegiate champions. Some are Olympians. They come for the Drake Relays, which has been held continuously since nineteen ten, making it one of the oldest outdoor track and field events in America.

Drake University established the relays as a regional collegiate meet. Within two decades, it had become a national event. The blue oval at Drake Stadium, the distinctive royal-blue running surface that has been a Drake visual identity for decades, is now recognized as one of the iconic images of American track and field, broadcast nationally each spring.

Over the decades, the relays have served as a proving ground for athletes who went on to define their sports. Jesse Owens, who won four gold medals at the nineteen thirty-six Berlin Olympics, competed here in his collegiate years. Carl Lewis, who dominated the nineteen eighties and early nineties, appeared here during his championship years. The list reads like a continuous autobiography of American sprinting and distance running across a century.

What makes the Drake Relays distinct from the major commercial track meets is its format: team relay events, not just individual sprint finals. Relay racing rewards a kind of collective precision, the handoff, the coordination of four individuals into a single fluid performance, that individual-event track meets do not capture the same way. The crowd here understands the relay as a unit. They watch the baton.

Every April, Drake is the center of American track. Iowa has had that distinction for more than a hundred years.