Team USA won the 4x100m relay at the 2023 World Championships. That result is to be expected. They swept the World Championship in both the 100 meter and the 200 meter dashes in 2022 with 6 different men. In 2023 Noah Lyles won both events all by himself. In fact, three of the ten fastest men ever in the 100 meter are running for team USA right now, and he isn’t one of them. However  there was a man on the championship winning 4x100m relay team that almost nobody recognizes. Brandon Carnes was the third leg of team USA’s relay handing off the baton to Noah Lyles. That makes him a World Champion. But what is also true is that he is an unattached athlete, without any apparel sponsor. So he shocked the track world including all of its sponsors by winning a gold medal. Brandon Carnes has always been better than most people gave him credit for. His career is also proof that outside validation is not necessary for any athlete to fulfill their true potential.

How good was Brandon Carnes before turing pro?

If it feels like Brandon Carnes came from out of nowhere, that is not 100 percent of accurate. Up until 2023 he was the type of athlete that one could call a survivor. He kept on figuring out ways to get into championship races, even if he never won the championship himself. At the high school level he was a first team national elite sprinter out of the state of Florida. That would normally be good enough to compete for a state championship almost anywhere else in the nation. He finished 7th in the 200 meter dash final as a junior and fourth in the 100 meter dash. So he was good enough to get recruited, but not by the top programs in his home state like Florida and Florida State. During his senior year, he actually failed to run new PRs in either event and accepted a scholarship offer to compete for the University of Northern Iowa in the Missouri Valley Conference.

As soon as he started his college career he dominated the Missouri Valley. Brandon Carnes literally went undefeated in conference championship meets for four years straight in the short sprints. He ran the 60 and 200 meter dashes indoors, along with the 100 and 200 meter dashes outdoors. He literally never lost a race, not even in the preliminary rounds. While he racked up 16 conference titles he also kept getting faster and faster, making the NCAA west regional as a freshman, and then the NCAA outdoor championships in the 200 meter dash as a sophomore. He would be eliminated in the prelims that year, and go on to qualify for the NCAA championships every single year until he graduated. But as a junior, and as a senior no matter what event he ran, he would get eliminated in the prelims as he crept closer and closer to making the final. 

How good is Brandon Carnes in pro track?

At the college level Brandon Carnes ran way faster than he was ever expected to. As a result, it was questionable if he ever make it as a pro. However, Brandon Carnes clearly didn’t give up on his dream. He ran his last college race all the way back in 2017 and kept showing up to the USA championships basically every year since. In each of those years he kept figuring out how to compete. In 2018, his first year out of college he made the USA indoor championship final in the 60 meter dash. But he false started in the final race. In 2020 he made the final again, in a race where Christian Coleman ran the second fastest 60 meter dash in history. He actually finished third, behind and eventual World Championship silver medalist in the 100 meter dash, Marvin Bracey-Williams.

At the Olympic trials in 2021 he was there in the 200 meter dash in the prelims. Later in 2022 he showed up again indoors, losing to the same two men Christian Coleman, and Marvin Bracey-Williams But in that race he beat the eventual USA Champion Cravont Charleston. Outdoors he underachieved by that standard only making the semifinals in the 100 and the 200. Early in his pro career Brandon was sponsored by Adidas but by 2022 it seems that they didn’t think he was good enough to wear their products. That is why through the entirety of 2023 he ran completely unattached.

In the 2023 season Brandon Carnes not only made the 100 meter final at the USA championships, but finished fourth overall. Since America has so many fast guys anyway, that was good enough to land him a spot on the relay team for the World Championships. He was the only American man, not to run in the 100 meter dash individually whom they included on the relay team. And it worked out for them, because now he, along with the rest of the team, are World Champions.

The Bottom Line

It is unclear what the future of Brandon Carnes career will look like. But the best way to describe now as a competitor is as “gamer”. He figures out how to compete at just about every level he has ever run at. He was a high school boy from Florida whom they said wasn’t good enough to run for the best colleges in that state. And as a professional track athlete they said wasn’t even good enough to get sponsored to do it. But Brandon Carnes is now a World Champion. That means he wears the red, white, and blue, to go along with his gold medal. Adidas however, has only themselves to blame that he isn’t wearing their logo as well, right about now.

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