The Pass Is the Race

On the evening of 21 August 2008, the United States fielded one of the fastest relay squads in Olympic history. Tyson Gay — the reigning world 100m champion — was on the anchor leg. The gold was, in most observers’ minds, a formality.

They dropped the baton in the final exchange and were disqualified in the heats.

That was not a freak incident. It was the opening chapter of a pattern. Disqualified in 2016 for a pass completed outside the exchange zone. Eliminated in Tokyo without reaching the final. Disqualified again in Paris 2024 — extending a medal drought that now spans a quarter of a century. The US men have not won relay gold since Sydney 2000. In that time, they have consistently fielded four of the fastest sprinters on earth. They have consistently failed to get the baton around.

The exchange zone is twenty metres long. Nobody drops the baton on purpose.

When the slower team wins

The contrast is Japan at Rio 2016. They had no individual in the squad who had broken ten seconds for the 100 metres. They finished second.

Their coach, Shunji Karube, had spent six months working with relay candidates before the race. Not practising the race, but practising the exchange. He standardised the technique, studied the handover on high-speed cameras, and optimised the distance between runners until each transfer covered less ground than the one before.

By Rio, Japan’s exchanges were almost one full metre longer per handover than their own 2008 standard. Across three exchanges, that compounds. The baton still travels 400 metres. The runners travel less. The cumulative gain over the Americans was more than one second. In a race decided by hundredths, that is not a marginal advantage. It is a different race.

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When the pass works, the baton travels faster than either runner could carry it alone. The outgoing runner’s momentum becomes the incoming runner’s launch. The sum outperforms the parts. When it doesn’t, both runners lose ground simultaneously, and no amount of individual pace recovers what is lost in the exchange zone.

Sprint relay is, as one observer noted, traditionally among the least coached disciplines in athletics. Sprinters prioritise their individual events. The exchange is assumed. The teams that consistently outperform their individual talent are the ones willing to invest in what everyone else skips.

What actually gets transferred

The owner-manager to professional leader transition is among the most consequential exchanges in organisational life. It happens in almost every business that outlasts its founder. It is almost never practised with the same seriousness as the race it determines.

What gets transferred is the role — the title, the reporting lines, the ninety-day plan. What rarely transfers is the pattern: the informal decision logic, the relationships that carry weight without appearing on any chart, the cultural knowledge that took a decade to build. Michael Polanyi called this the tacit dimension of expertise. His observation was precise: we can know more than we can tell. Founders hold vast stores of knowledge they have never needed to articulate, because they were always in the room. The handover document does not capture it.

“We can know more than we can tell.” — Michael Polanyi, The Tacit Dimension (1966)

Polanyi called this the tacit dimension of expertise — the knowledge so embedded in practice that it cannot be adequately described. Take the case of Henry Bessemer. Bessemer had patented his steelmaking process in 1856, sold the rights, and was sued when the buyers could not replicate it. He knew how to do it. He simply could not convey it.

The person nobody asks to practise

In most leadership transitions, the incoming leader is scrutinised carefully. Their readiness assessed, their plan reviewed, their first months monitored. Nobody asks the outgoing leader to practise the pass.

Noam Wasserman’s  tracked hundreds of founder-led businesses through succession. Within three years, half of all founder-CEOs were no longer in the role. Four out of five were eventually replaced. His diagnosis was not incompetence. It was identity. Founders built something from nothing. Letting go is not a logistical act. It is an identity event. And identity events make people grip precisely when the baton needs to move.

The cost is rarely immediate. The incoming leader runs well for a while. Then something happens that requires the pattern — a client relationship needing careful navigation, a cultural moment requiring a specific register — and the pattern is not there. It stayed with the person who left. That is a dropped baton. It just takes longer to hit the floor.

What practising the pass looks like

John Gabarro’s  identified five stages in a successful taking-charge process. He found that transitions failed at the same point almost every time: incoming leaders compressed the early diagnostic stages under pressure to demonstrate momentum, then reshaped the business on the basis of an incomplete model. Technically plausible. Organisationally wrong. They had the speed. They were in the exchange zone. The pass looked complete. It wasn’t.

Practising the pass means the outgoing leader naming the pattern explicitly. Not the job description, but the actual logic of the business. It means the incoming leader being coached on what to receive, not just what to deliver. It means both parties working through real decisions together in the overlap period, with the baton moving progressively rather than dropped on a date.

The question worth putting to both parties before any transition begins: have you practised this? Not prepared for it. Not planned it. Practised it.

The race is decided in the exchange zone

Organisations invest considerable effort in finding the right incoming leader. They invest almost none in the quality of the exchange. The assumption that is rarely examined, universally held is that if both people are capable, the transition will work.

Japan’s coach at Rio knew otherwise. He did not assume the exchange would happen because the runners were ready. He designed it, drilled it, and treated it as the competitive advantage it . The silver medal did not come from the fastest legs on the track. It came from the twenty metres between them.

The overlap period in a leadership transition is that twenty metres. Most organisations treat it as a courtesy. A handover fortnight, a few shared meetings, a deck of context. Japan’s coach would recognise that immediately. He would also recognise what it costs.

The baton does not pass itself. And the leaders who understand that on both sides of the exchange, are the ones whose organisations keep running when they let go.