Carnival Time

Spring doesn't really come to Philadelphia until the last week in April, when the Penn Relay Carnival, self-proclaimed as "the Oldest, the Biggest, the Best" track meet in the country, takes place at Franklin Field. The AAU and IC4A championships are in truth older, having been first run in 1876, thereby antedating the Penn Relays by 19 years, but this is a meet that includes elementary school, high school, college, club and individual events in all-embracing celebration of the sport. The Penn Relays is indisputably the biggest, with more than 7,000 athletes, a record field, expected to compete this week. The best? Well, in Texas and California and the Midwest they may not agree, but just ask any Eastern athlete.

The first Penn Relays were held on April 21, 1895. Some 100 boys and men competed in four high school and five college relays, 10 individual events and a two-mile bicycle race. Last year the relays were expanded to occupy a full week. This year the meet again started with a marathon on Sunday, and then proceeded with the decathlon on Tuesday and Wednesday. The high school girls and college women take over on Thursday (with the men's long-distance races taking place that night), and Friday and Saturday will be jam-packed with relays and individual events. Included in the schedule are high school and college championships, Olympic Development events and the Benjamin Franklin Mile for invited stars. Last year 6,101 participants, more than half of them high schoolers, competed in 170 events, which took 34� hours to run off.

Jim Tuppeny, the track coach at the University of Pennslyvania—Franklin Field is also Penn's football stadium—and director of the Relays since 1970, judges the size of the field by the weight of the starting numbers given out—in 1978 about one and a half tons. Or by the number of safety pins used to attach these numbers to the jerseys of the athletes—86,000 last year.

Penn doesn't pay travel expenses to the Relays except to give four or five of the most distant and loyal colleges a few hundred dollars to help defray costs. Nonetheless, it is considered such a privilege to compete in the meet that thousands clamor to attend. Every year during the first week of January, Tuppeny, Herb Hartnett, Penn's sports information director, and half a dozen volunteers send out thousands of entry cards. The mailing list includes Bermuda, the Bahamas, Puerto Rico, Jamaica, Barbados, the Virgin Islands and Canada. The deadline for high-school and club entries is April 5; for colleges, April 12. Two days later, the weighty Carnival program—the 1979 version runs 84 pages—goes to the printers. All but Philadelphia athletes have to meet qualifying standards. Dick Ream, a retired high school superintendent, monitors a 16-state telephone hookup to accept last-minute reports from coaches that their charges have qualified.

Dr. Ken Doherty, a bronze medalist in the decathlon in the 1928 Olympics who became track coach at Penn in 1948 and conducted the meet until his retirement in 1969, deserves much of the credit for the Relays' extraordinary growth. "I was always thinking in terms of increasing the number of participants," he says, "and while doing so, I tried to focus the attention of the spectators by scheduling the most interesting events within a three-hour period on Saturday afternoon, mostly college and high school championship finals." In those days the Relays were a Friday-Saturday meet, so to accommodate all the competitors, in 1951 Penn installed a four-lane inside track, which measured 404 yards. Thus, competitors who draw the inner lanes take off from a starting line behind the regular one to make up for the missing 32.9 meters in 1,600-meter events (Penn converted to metric distances in 1976).

When the Relays were first held, the athletes stayed in tents pitched alongside the stands, which lent a carnival atmosphere to the goings-on. (In 1910 that spirit was acknowledged when the official name for the event became the Relay Race Carnival; it later became the Penn Relay Carnival.) The Philadelphia Inquirer , describing the inaugural meet on its society pages, reported that "hundreds and hundreds of pretty girls, adorned in all their spring finery, with bright sparkling eyes and cheeks flushed with excitement...cheered their favorites on to victory."

In 1896 the Inquirer again resorted to the gushy prose of the day. "The spectators were on the qui vive from start to finish, and as the game boys struggled on with staring eyes, and bloodless lips in many cases, and fell across the finish line to be borne away by their friends, their manliness and grit were greeted by appreciative cheers." Evidently that kind of stuff went down well with its readers, for the next year the Inquirer related, "The track was lightning fast as runners stood on the stretch with strained eyes and cried for their comrades who were struggling pluckily, faintly through the stretch to 'Come, come,' that they might touch them, and dart away as they challenged each other before the thousands and run till the very breath had left their bodies.... The thousands rose up and cheered, cheered till they had little more breath left than the objects of their admiration. They had seen pluck, speed, grace, and they were glad to compliment it with their huzzas."

Today the spectators at the Relays, who usually number some 40,000 for Saturday's events, are no less enthusiastic. Athletes rate them tops at producing "Oooooohs," especially on Saturday morning during the three hours of boys' high school mile-relay races, when there is heavy action in nickel-and-dime betting up in the stands. A big ooooh accompanies any youngster who bursts into a sprint and it reverberates all around the stadium in a mounting crescendo. But when a kid ties up, usually in the northeast corner of the track, the ooooh dies too. There are no huzzas for the faint anymore, no matter how plucky.

The most hectic action takes place on Friday from 11:50 a.m. till 2:40 p.m. Last year during this span, 1,974 boys and girls and men and women competed in 47 400-meter relays, with a race going off every three minutes and 37 seconds. Furthermore, at 1:30 p.m. the shuttle relays, in which another 576 competitors took part, started in the infield. Confusion? Chaos? Delays? No way. The meet clicks along like clockwork.

In the early years athletes were identified in the program by the colors of their jerseys, like jockeys. But by 1925 the number of entries had grown so large that the organizers began to employ a unique lettering system. The first 25 relay teams are given A through Z (I is not used), the next receive AA, BB, and so on. After ZZ comes 3A, 3B and so on. "We divide the high school boys' 400-meter relays into two sections," says Hartnett. "If we didn't, last year we would have gone through the alphabet 12 times."