The 130th running of the Penn Relays opens at Franklin Field in Philadelphia on Thursday 23 April, with three days of racing that will take the meet from opening-session high-school heats on Thursday morning through to the Olympic Development sprints and the USA-versus-The-World relays on Saturday afternoon. More than 15,000 athletes are expected to compete across the weekend, making it the largest single track and field meet in the United States and — in terms of race starts — one of the largest anywhere in the world. For fans at home, the entire weekend will stream live on FloTrack and the FloSports app.
Thursday's programme is traditionally the connective tissue of the meet. The morning runs on high-school heats in the sprint relays, before Olympic Development and college sections take the track from the early afternoon. The headline event on the opening day is the Olympic Development 10,000m, the longest individual race of the weekend and a staple of the meet's distance running calendar. Thursday also includes the men's and women's college distance medley relays — a race format born at Penn Relays — with strong entries from several Northeast conferences likely to push the programme's best marks of the season so far.
Friday is college relay day in its purest form, dominated by the 4x100 metres, 4x200 metres, sprint medley and 4x400 metres championships of America. The meet's blue-ribbon event on Friday is the men's 4x400m championship of America final, held under the lights in the early evening, which has produced more than a dozen world-leading marks over the past decade. A new event for 2026 — an Olympic Development 800m hurdles — debuts on Friday evening and will be contested over a distance that has only recently been formalised on the World Athletics programme; race director Dave Johnson described it as "exactly the kind of experiment Penn Relays was built to run" when the addition was announced in November.
Saturday is the day the sport's professionals turn Franklin Field into a Diamond League crowd. Olympic triple jump champion Thea LaFond, world indoor high-jump champion Vashti Cunningham and Olympic high-jump silver medallist Shelby McEwen are all entered in the Saturday field events, while the Olympic Development sprint programme features strong entries in the men's 100m and women's 200m. The traditional centrepiece — the men's and women's USA-versus-The-World 4x100m relays — closes the afternoon. Organisers confirmed on Monday that a USA team anchored by Kenny Bednarek will face squads from Jamaica and a Pan-African select in both the men's and women's events.
Philadelphia's infrastructure turns the weekend into as much a festival as a meet. Franklin Field's 43,000-seat bowl fills for the Saturday session, the University of Pennsylvania dedicates two additional warm-up tracks on the Penn Park site, and the surrounding streets of University City host a shoe and apparel expo that has expanded each year since the pandemic. For visiting schools the event is a three-day logistical marathon in its own right — the Penn Relays accommodations office was still placing busloads of Midwest high-school teams into Center City hotels as recently as Sunday evening. The meet opens at 09:00 on Thursday morning and closes with the USA-versus-The-World 4x400m on Saturday evening.