T&T World Re­lays gold medal­ist De­on Lendore says, “the tar­get is now on T&T’s back” af­ter the re­lay team blitzed the Unit­ed States once again in the Men’s 4x400m re­lay event on Sun­day in Yoko­hama, Japan.

Lendore, who ran the first leg of the race, said the suc­cess sets the team up nice­ly ahead of the World Cham­pi­onships to be held in Qatar be­tween Sep­tem­ber 28 and Oc­to­ber 6. T&T is al­so the de­fend­ing cham­pi­ons in the 4x400m of that event, and in strik­ing sim­i­lar­i­ty to 2017 fi­nal, T&T’s an­chor­man came from be­hind to pip the USA at the line.

The sprint­er said, “It sets us up for World Champs in a good way and a bad way. We have the con­fi­dence go­ing in­to World Champs but now we know we have the tar­get on our backs times two be­cause this is the sec­ond time we’ve done some­thing like this to the Unit­ed States so we know they re­al­ly want vengeance. It al­so push­es us in prac­tice so we work twice as hard know­ing that the tar­get is on our back again.”

In a tight­ly fought race, T&T’s an­chor­man Machel Ce­de­nio made up sev­er­al me­tres of ground to edge out Amer­i­can Paul Dede­wo on the fi­nal leg. T&T ran a world-lead­ing time of 3:00.81 while the USA was dis­qual­i­fied for a lane in­fringe­ment short­ly af­ter the race. Three legs be­fore, Lendore said he tried to set the pace for the race by hand­ing over the ba­ton to Jereem Richards in a good po­si­tion. “It was all about try­ing to put the guys out there, keep them close to every­body so we could move for­ward. I did my best, giv­ing it my all,” he told Guardian Me­dia Sports.

While the min­is­ter of Sport and Youth Af­fairs, Sham­fa Cud­joe, con­firmed the World Re­lays is not on the na­tion­al sports pol­i­cy’s re­wards and in­cen­tives list­ing, the team of Lendore, Richards, Asa Gue­vara, Ce­de­nio and On­al Mitchell will share the IAAF first prize mon­ey of $US50,000.

Af­ter hand­ing over the ba­ton, Lendore was left a spec­ta­tor for the rest of the race, but he said he wasn’t sur­prised at Ce­de­no's hero­ics. “I could have bare­ly watched the race be­cause they were try­ing to move us off the track while we were try­ing to watch the oth­er guys run. To me, see­ing Ce­de­nio from the 200m mark­er, hav­ing the con­fi­dence of see­ing a guy like him, he knows what to do in sit­u­a­tions like that. He’s been there be­fore and I knew he had the ca­pa­bil­i­ty of com­ing through with the vic­to­ry,” Lendore said.