The track and field world championships were full of surprises

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Heading into this year's World Athletics Championships at historic Hayward Field in Oregon, Canada's medal hopes seemed to rest on a set of familiar faces. Andre De Grasse, Damian Warner, Moh Ahmed and Evan Dunfee had accounted for all five of Canada's podium appearances at the last worlds, in 2019, and were the country's only individual track and field medallists at last summer's Tokyo Olympics.

Instead, for a variety of reasons, none of those four men made an individual podium in Oregon. And yet, Canada still finished the meet last night with a solid four medals, thanks to these pleasant surprises:

The men's 4x100m relay team's shocking gold

To borrow from the late, great Don Wittman, Canadian sprinters just love Saturday nights in the United States. Twenty-six years after Donovan Bailey won Olympic 100m and 4x100m gold on back-to-back weekends in Georgia, De Grasse anchored Canada to a stunning upset in the men's relay final in Oregon. The improbable victory gave the country its first major championship in the 4x100 since Bailey, Bruny Surin, Glenroy Gilbert and Robert Esmie sandwiched their Olympic gold at the 1996 Atlanta Games between back-to-back world titles in '95 and '97.

This one really came out of nowhere. Slowed by a recent bout with COVID-19, De Grasse looked awful in the previous weekend's 100m event. His sluggish 10.21-second run in the semifinals eliminated him from the competition and ended his career-long streak of seven medals in seven individual events at major championships. When the Olympic 200m champ decided to skip that event to rest up for the