Canadian quartet of Brown, Blake, Rodney, De Grasse advances to 4x100 relay final

The Canadian quartet of Aaron Brown, Jerome Blake, Brendon Rodney and Andre De Grasse have punched their ticket into the men's 4x100-metre relay final set for Saturday night at the World Athletics Championships.

Canada finished second in their heat behind France in a season-best time of 38.10.

USA's foursome of Christian Coleman, Noah Lyles, Elijah Hall and Marvin Bracy were the fastest qualifiers on the night with a world-leading time of 37.87.

De Grasse, who withdrew from the 200m event earlier this week at worlds, had a brilliant last leg to guide Canada to the season-best performance.

"I'm feeling good. I like our chances tomorrow," De Grasse told CBC Sports.

"Hopefully tomorrow we can get on the podium and get that gold medal. We've won silver together as a squad. It would be great to come away with a gold medal."

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The 27-year-old from Markham, Ont., has been recovering from his second bout with COVID-19. Just weeks earlier he was suffering from a number of symptoms, including shortness of breath.

"I'm coming back slowly. Definitely the rest this week has helped a lot," he said after the race. 

This same four won bronze at last year's summer Olympics and then were later upgraded to silver after a British doping violation. Now they're eyeing gold on American soil.

"We really feel like we should go for gold. We felt like we had a good chance at getting gold in Tokyo," Brown said.

"We're one spot away from gold and why not go for it? I feel like we have a good shot at it, as good as anybody else."

Brown, 30, was running in his seventh race at worlds after making it all the way to the 100m and 200m finals.

"We're looking strong for the final."

"Job isn't