The most marketable husband-and-wife pairing in American athletics is back on the Blue Oval this weekend. Hunter Woodhall, the Paris 2024 Paralympic 400m champion, and Tara Davis-Woodhall, the Paris Olympic long jump gold medallist, will both contest their events at the 116th Drake Relays on Saturday — the second consecutive year the couple have raced together in Des Moines. It is the first Drake Relays weekend since the meet officially added a series of Paralympic events to its main programme, a move that both Woodhalls publicly pushed for during last year's edition and that has quietly reshaped the Saturday afternoon running order.
Hunter Woodhall will line up in the men's Paralympic 400m dash at 14:05 CT, the only T62 field assembled outside of a major championship this year. Germany's Johannes Floors, Iran's Sajjad Mohammadian and Britain's Thomas Young have all accepted invitations, turning what was a solo showcase in 2025 into something more like a Diamond League sprint final. Woodhall's current world lead of 45.21 is already the second-fastest opening time of his career, and the man himself has said on Instagram that "Drake is where we go to see where the season can go". The in-stadium crowd of just under 14,000 on Saturday will also be the largest single-session audience for a Paralympic track race outside of a championship in U.S. history.
Tara Davis-Woodhall arrives with the weight of expectation shifted, not lifted, by her Olympic gold. She opened the outdoor season with 6.97m in Baton Rouge on 4 April — second on her career all-time list — and has openly discussed the seven-metre barrier in interviews with Track & Field News last month. Her competition on Saturday includes the Jamaican Ackelia Smith, fresh from a 6.94m mark in Kingston, and the former Drake Relays champion Quanesha Burks. The women's long jump is scheduled for a 16:30 CT start and will be the fifth of the day's seven field-event finals; organisers have deliberately slotted it at the edge of peak broadcast hours so CBS Sports can lead with it into the evening relay programme.
Beyond the sport, the Woodhalls' return matters to Drake for reasons that have little to do with marks. Last year's pair of appearances added an estimated 1.8 million social-media impressions to the meet in the forty-eight hours around their races, according to an analysis published by meet director Blake Boldon in November, and lifted Paralympic-race viewership on the Drake Relays streaming channel by a factor of six over the 2024 edition. The Relays Hall of Fame ceremony on Thursday night will also honour Hunter in a special category dedicated to Paralympic athletes who have raced in Des Moines — a nod to the meet's changing sense of who its marquee stars are.
The Woodhalls told reporters at the Drake press conference on Monday that their training block has been built around Saturday's races rather than the longer-term targets of Tokyo's World Championships in September. "We live thirty minutes from here when we're not travelling," said Hunter, who trains out of Fayetteville alongside his wife but grew up in Utah. "This is home track for us now." Tara added that the long-term goal — a first world outdoor long jump title in Eugene next summer — feels more reachable when the season is book-ended by Drake and a home Worlds. Coverage of both Paralympic 400m and the women's long jump will run on CBS and Peacock from 14:00 Central on Saturday, with the relay programme concluding at 19:30.