As of 8.46pm local time in Berlin on Saturday, British sprinting entered unchartered territory thanks to one woman.
Dina Asher-Smith is not just the greatest female sprinter Britain has ever produced. She is not just the queen of the European 100m and 200m, having destroyed everyone who dared stand in her path over five incredible days.
She is, without a shadow of a doubt, the best sprinter anywhere on the planet right now.
Sure, there is the caveat that it is not an Olympic or World Championship year and the Americans and Jamaicans therefore have no major competition to peak for. It is an argument not without logic. But, to be frank, it would probably not make the slightest bit of difference right now. Not the way Asher-Smith is running.
Based on what we have witnessed in Berlin over the past week, it is difficult to think of anyone in the world who could touch her at the moment.
The numbers speak for themselves. Her 10.85-second winning time from Tuesday put her top of this year’s 100m world rankings and the 21.89sec she ran on Saturday night did the same for 200m.
They would also have been good enough to win both world titles at last summer’s World Championships in London.
And all at the age of 22. It is impossible to imagine a future that does not end with Olympic and world podiums. She may yet become the first British woman in history to win a global sprint title.
“I have obliterated my own expectations,” she said, unable to grasp the enormity of her achievements in Berlin.
“I told myself loosely this year that I wanted to run a 10.8sec [for 100m] and I had a joke with my physio that if I ran a 10.85sec I would buy myself a cute necklace that I have been eyeing up that is a bit expensive.
“Then when I did it the other day I was like: ‘Oh no I might actually have to buy it’.
“Coming into the 200m I didn’t have a time in my head because I didn’t know how tired I would be and it is a bit cold. I just wanted to win.
“It was over in a blur and I am just full of happiness and relief. 21.89sec… I haven’t taken it. With the 10.85sec it is more than I could have asked for.”
Watching on from her vantage point above the finish line, the tears did not take long to flow for her mother Julie, who accompanies her daughter to all her races worldwide.
The Asher-Smith success story is a true family affair. Only earlier this year did Asher-Smith, fresh her university graduation, move out of the family home and begin grappling with such tedious things as council tax, bills and food shopping. “I’m just trying to be a grown up,” she said.
Even then, she has only moved 12 miles down the road – close enough for Julie and her father Winston to come round and help out with cooking when required.
As the self-proclaimed “master of understatement”, her coach John Blackie is not a man to be reduced to tears – he wryly greeted one of her numerous national records earlier this season with the verdict: “She has performed quite well.”
But even he was unable to ignore the magnitude of Asher-Smith’s feat on Saturday night, describing it as “stratospheric”.
Her achievements legitimately mean more to Blackie than most coaches. She was just nine years old when he first spotted her athletic ability on the track in Bromley, south London.
They have stuck together through thick and thin ever since – through national age group titles, world junior titles, European titles and now this.
Indeed there was a point not too long ago where it became apparent that she was too quick for the rest of the female sprinters in Blackie’s group, so he now throws her in with the men instead.
“I’m normally at the back because they’ve gone off and it’s my job to hunt them down,” she said.
“If I’m too far away John will nudge me and say: ‘You’ve got to keep up with them if you want to run the good times’.
“Even though I was able to [win gold in Berlin] and it might have looked good, that’s down to six days a week for however many weeks a year chasing the boys and letting them drag me round the track and kill me.”
It is a winning formula. Away from the track Asher-Smith will now undoubtedly become the brightest beacon for a sport that is forever having to fight for its worth in Britain – that rare person who punctures the wider conscious and extends beyond the athletics hardcore.
She will seize Jessica Ennis-Hill’s mantle as the darling of British athletics and serve as the figurehead for a new generation that has excelled at these European Championships.
And the most endearing thing of all is it she will to do so with that disbelieving smile on her face, continually achieving things she never thought herself capable of, repeatedly obliterating her expectations.
Source: telegraph.co.uk
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