There have been moments from the Paris 2024 Olympics that Canadians will always remember. For observe and subject followers, the second was when the lads’s 4x100m relay workforce—Aaron Brown, Brendon Rodney, Jerome Blake and Andre De Grasse—stormed to Olympic gold from Lane 9 on a wet August evening on the Stade de France. Their victory marked Canada’s first gold within the males’s relay occasion in 28 years, and on Saturday, the quartet was named 2024 Group of the 12 months by the Canadian Press.
The Canadian Press Group of the 12 months Award is yearly given to the nation’s best-performing workforce. This marks solely the second time the award has been introduced to a workforce within the sport of athletics. Notable previous recipients embrace the Toronto Raptors, who received the NBA Championship in 2019, and the Canadian males’s ice hockey workforce, who received gold on house soil on the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver. The final time the award was given in athletics was in 1996, when Donovan Bailey, Bruny Surin, Glenroy Gilbert and Robert Esmie received gold within the males’s 4x100m relay in Atlanta.
The recipient of the award is set by votes from Canadian Press sports activities editors and writers, and this yr, the lads’s 4x100m relay workforce earned 70 per cent of the vote, a testomony to their memorable efficiency.
The gold medal in Paris was significantly vindicating for De Grasse and Brown, each of whom weren’t 100 per cent through the Video games, failing to qualify for the finals of their particular person occasions, the 100m and 200m.
“I by no means stopped believing,” Brown advised Canadian Working. “These guys can do unbelievable issues once we get collectively and put our minds to it. By no means depend us out, it doesn’t matter what lane … We could be in Lane 2, we could be in Lane 9, we may very well be within the stands—all of us believed we might make magic collectively… wherever.”
For De Grasse, the relay gold tied him with swimmer Penny Oleksiak as Canada’s most embellished Olympian, with seven whole medals. The victory additionally accomplished an Olympic medal set for Brown, Rodney, and De Grasse, who’ve been collectively since successful bronze on the Rio 2016 Video games. “Bronze in Rio, silver in Tokyo—this gold was the icing on the cake.” De Grasse mentioned.
Trying forward, Brown, Blake, Rodney and De Grasse have their sights set on the 2025 World Athletics Championships in Tokyo. This time, they don’t anticipate to be seen as underdogs.