Eagles’ wide receiver Devon Allen excited to run in the Penn Relays again

Allen and Philly's Ajee’ Wilson are among the headline names who will run at Franklin Field next week.

Eagles wide receiver Devon Allen (right) met with kids from Penn's Young Quakers Community Athletics at Franklin Field on Thursday, a week before the start of the Penn Relays.Read moreTyger Williams / Staff Photographer

Published April 20, 2023, 6:07 p.m. ET

It’s the time of year when Devon Allen’s two favorite sports pursuits intersect.

Next week, the Eagles practice squad wide receiver will once again run the 110-meter hurdles at the Penn Relays at Franklin Field. Soon after that, he will turn his attention back to football and try to earn a full-time roster spot with the Eagles.

After competing in the 2016 and 2021 Olympics, Allen won the 110-meter hurdles Olympic Development race at last year’s Relays in 13.11 seconds — breaking an event record that had stood since 1998. At a news conference Thursday at Franklin Field, he called that day “probably one of the most exciting and memorable competitions in my career.”

Last June, he ran the third-fastest 110-meter time ever recorded by a man, 12.84, at USA Track and Field’s NYC Grand Prix.

The next month, he went to the World Athletics outdoor championships, which were held on his alma mater’s track at the University of Oregon. Among the favorites to win, he was controversially disqualified for reacting to the starter’s gun .001 seconds faster than was legal. (Yes, really: There’s a rule mandating a minimum 0.1-second reaction time.)

Thursday, Allen admitted that he’s “a little bit behind in terms of training on the track.” But there’s a good reason for that: the Eagles’ run to the Super Bowl, which stretched well into February. Allen didn’t get back on the track until the end of that month.

“The last eight weeks, I’ve been mostly focused on getting back into track shape and sprinting, but starting Monday, I’ll be back in Philly for [football] offseason training,” he said. “I think I can handle it. I did pretty well last year and still competed well and ran fast.”

Allen said in February that there are no restrictions in his contract on being able to run track events.

“Now that I have a year under my belt,” he said Thursday, “I’m going to be a little more [able to] know what to expect in terms of what’s expected of me on the field, and what I can do on the track in order to perform well.”

Allen and Philadelphia’s Ajee’ Wilson, one of the world’s top 800-meter runners, will be the headline names next week. Wilson will again run in the 600-meter Olympic Development exhibition race, after finishing second last year to Olympic gold medalist Athing Mu.

That race came a few weeks after Wilson won the 800-meter world indoor title in Belgrade, Serbia. She finished eighth at the world outdoor championships last summer.

There will be another world outdoor championship this year, in August in Budapest. Usually, the championship is held every two years, but the 2021 edition was postponed a year because of the COVID-19 pandemic. With another world championship to come in 2025, that will mean four straight years of track’s biggest championships, and the world’s elite runners will have to plan accordingly.

“I think if you’re intentional about how you’re recovering and planning,” Wilson said, “I think we’ll all still show up and be running fast, and the results will speak for themselves. So you just have to figure it out.”