Secrets of the AWESOME FOURSOME
Nethaneel the golden boy had not seen mum in three years
THE tremors were still being felt deep into the early hours of yesterday morning, long after Danny Talbot had tiptoed past the sleeping hurdler in his room. He got under the covers, put his headphones in and watched the golden moment on loop for two hours.
When he got up a short time later, he reached for his phone and went through it all again — CJ Ujah to Adam Gemili to Talbot to Nethaneel Mitchell-Blake, Bolt grimacing in the background. The sheer bedlam of it all.
In Talbot’s estimation the clip might be played for a while yet, given he and the rest of the 4x100m relay team had created the stand-out British moment at these World Championships.
There will be arguments for Mo Farah’s golden battle royale against the unified forces of East Africa in the 10,000m, but Farah wins have been bankable in an era when four British men getting a baton around a track has been made to look very difficult indeed. This night was different, with four talented men with four charming tales adding up to a golden sum.
For Talbot, a softly- spoken 26-year-old, the story takes in a picture in his mother’s living room in Trowbridge. He revealed at the team’s holding camp in Paris last month that she had framed an image of him from 2015, with the sprinter in lane seven next to Bolt on his inside.
The angle of the camera gave the false impression Talbot was leading the eight-time Olympic champion and he enjoyed saying how a ‘ Martian might walk into the house and think I was the greatest athlete of all time’.
Reflecting yesterday, he said: ‘My mum probably has about 50 new pictures already lined up to get framed.’
He added: ‘It’s just so great. When I got back after the race, I actually had to sneak into my room because I was sharing with David Omoregie. He was fast asleep so I put my headphones on and watched it. I was lying there for a good few hours, just thinking, “Wow, I am a world champion”.’
Down the corridor, at shortly after 4am, Mitchell-Blake, who had led the team across the line, put out a tweet, showing him tearfully hugging his mother, Audrey, in the stadium. The prescient detail is that he had not seen her for three years.
He had grown up in Newham, next to the London Stadium, but after the family relocated to Jamaica when he was 13 he eventually went on to Louisiana State University to study international trade, a degree he only completed in May.
While there, he broke 20sec for 200m and 10sec for 100m on the college circuit but never interrupted his training and study routines and that has kept him away from his family.
‘All of us make sacrifices,’ he said. ‘It’s what it takes.
‘I actually had the opportunity to fly her out, which is what I did. She was down the road but I was in the holding camp and I didn’t want to move her around too much and then she was in Derby as my grandma is sick.
‘She came every day to the meet but I hadn’t actually said, “Hello mum”. When we won she got down to the sidelines and words cannot describe how much it meant to share that moment with her.’
The CJ Ujah story is one of disappointment after his brilliant season, where he won three Diamond League titles, but flopped in the 100m semi-final. He was famously criticised by team-mate Richard Kilty on live television after the debacle of a failed relay at the 2015 World Championships — one of five British disqualifications in the past seven major championships.
This time, he was a major driving force.
He recalled: ‘I said to myself after the 100m semi-finals, “You can’t sit at home, for the next five days I am going to get out there and help them get a medal”, and that’s what I did.’
Then there’s Gemili. This win came after he was injured and controversially overlooked for a place in the individual 200m competition. ‘There is a lot of redemption in this, for the season,’ he said.
But it also goes beyond that, to 2012, when he and Talbot botched their changeover in the same stadium at the Olympics.
‘It was horrible what we went through,’ Gemili said. ‘Five years later, to do it on the same track, in front of a home crowd . . . amazing. It’s been a hell of a journey.’
With a golden ending.