THIS is a special time for women’s sprinting in the UK and the British four proved it in Beijing last night by breaking the national record. Their time of 42.10 seconds was not good enough to earn a medal at the world championships, though, which was a source of real disappointment to the British girls.
Jamaica duly took the gold medal with the 100m champion, Shelly-Ann Fraser-Pryce, powering home ahead of the Americans and the quartet from Trinidad and Tobago, but a messy changeover between Asha Philip, the lead-off runner, and Dina Asher-Smith foretold the disastrous mishandling of the British men’s team a few moments later. Once again, it seemed that a late switch of the team from the heats to the final had cost the British quartet. But in truth, no one could realistically argue against the inclusion of Asher-Smith, the national 200m record-holder and the first British sprinter to run under 11 seconds for the 100m, nor with the decision not to include her in the heats so soon after her 200m final.
Unlike the men later, there was no bickering among the British girls, who never fully recovered from the hesitancy of the first changeover and against the likes of Allyson Felix and Dafne Schippers were always playing catch-up. Try as they might, the quartet of Philip, Asher-Smith, Jodie Williams and Desiree Henry could not quite overhaul the Trinidadians in the closing 50m and had to be content with a national record. Had they been fluent in their baton-changing, the record would have been smashed.
“It’s a bittersweet moment,” said Philip, who was selected for the 100m but had a disappointing championships. “We really did want to get a medal, we were destined to. We’ve worked so hard, we’ve trained individually as well. It really is unfortunate. We ran a national record, what more do you want us to do?
“Honestly, we tried our best. It’s just unfortunate we didn’t come home with a medal.
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“I know, though, that we’re only going to get better. We have come such a long way.”
The serious frustration is that the development of a talented group of British sprinters, both men and women, has been hampered at just the moment the programme needed to produce a medal or two. Just earlier in the day, Adam Gemili, a core member of the group but here in Beijing in his role as a cheerleader and morale-booster after being ruled out with a hamstring injury, had talked in glowing terms of the fantastic spirit in the British team and of how they could be pushing the Jamaicans and the Americans for medals.
When he switched from playing non-league football to become a full-time athlete, Gemili believed that losing a sense of sporting camaraderie would be one of the necessary sacrifices. In fact, he says, the unity at the heart of the British team is far stronger than in any dressing-room in football.
“Players come and go in football, but with your training group in athletics you go through a hard slog every day,” he says.
“You throw up at the track together, you travel to races together, it’s like one big family. To make the GB team, you know how hard people have had to work and you’ve done it together.
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“We all push each other, we all see each other doing well and we want to have a part of it.
“I feel this next generation is ready, but we’ve got big shoes to fill. But this crop of sprinters can certainly win medals if we all work together and all push each other.”
The structure of UK Athletics, with the two training groups based in Loughborough and at Lee Valley in north London, allows talented athletes to train with and against each other. Sometimes, as with the men’s relay team, the divide between the two groups becomes destructive; mostly it is at the heart of the recent rise of British sprinting.
A dose of reality, though, was administered to the British girls last night. “We have to remember what sort of field we’re in,” said Asher-Smith. “There are loads and loads of Olympic and world medallists standing on the line with you. So I feel that we did a good job. We pushed our boundaries and got a national record.”
Asher-Smith ends the season with three national records to her name, in the 100m and 200m and the sprint relay. But what she and her teammates would have wanted more than anything was a medal to start turning promise into real currency.