Why Britain is now sprinting to success

Right blend was found with ditching of egos and new focus on team ethic,

Back in 2010, at the European Championships in Barcelona, Mark Lewis-francis gave a vivid insight into the attitudes pervading British sprinting. Asked for his reaction to an unexpected silver medal over 100metres, he contrived an answer that was a miniature masterpiece of hubris. Combining grand delusion with third-person self-referencing, he said: “For all the knocks I’ve taken, this is the biggest comeback ever. This is the rebuild of Mark Lewis-francis.”

And what would he say to those critics who had questioned his pedigree? “Shhh,” he smirked, raising a finger to his lips. “Say no more, yeah.”

The main critic he had in mind was Michael Johnson, a four-time Olympic champion. Johnson, not unreasonably for a man with a 200m personal best of 19.32sec – as against Lewis-francis’s 20.77 – had never left much doubt that he viewed the Brit as a small-time braggart. But still “MLF”, as he liked to be known, continued to mistake his mediocrity for greatness, once memorably claiming that the Europeans were “on the same level as worlds or Olympics as an achievement”.

If the latest medal parade in Berlin has taught us anything about the country’s sprint contingent, it is that this conceitedness has vanished.

While Dina Asher-smith deserved her moment in the sun as the first British athlete to win a hat-trick of golds on such a stage, she recognised that it was not a passport to immortality – not when the past two global 100m finals have featured just one European representative, in Holland’s Dafne Schippers. It helps that her coach, John Blackie, is wary of making any long-term predictions for her career. “It’s too tough at the top to do that,” he says.

The refreshing absence of ego within this British squad is no accident.

Stephen Maguire, the Northern Irish coach who has turned around a dysfunctional men’s relay team, has a reputation for avoiding over-emphasis on any single contribution. It is one reason why he shuns the limelight himself.

The upturn in results has been stark: when Maguire took over in 2015, the relay line-up was a shambles, with Richard Kilty and CJ Ujah squabbling over a baton drop in Beijing. Come London 2017, though, Britain was toasting a quartet of world-beaters. Golds for both men and women in Berlin have merely cemented their credentials for Olympic titles in Tokyo.

Jo Jennings, the former high jumper who oversaw the emergence of Asher-smith and many others as development manager for UK Athletics, says: “Ultimately, it came down to getting rid of the personalities who didn’t want to be part of a team. The fun and games that used to happen around the relay team? That’s under control. They seem to be loving working with each other now.”

The reforms spearheaded by Maguire in the relays were systematic. To a track discipline that has long appeared, to the untrained eye, chaotic and arbitrary, he applied the shrewdest science, insisting that baton Titled: The GB men’s and women’s 4x100m relay teams won gold in Berlin changes had to be completed in less than two seconds each time, with no deceleration. Exact shoe sizes were taken to ensure that the athletes’ on-track markers were perfectly spotted, while Jennifer Savage, lead performance psychologist at the English Institute of Sport, was brought in to drill them on high-pressure scenarios. The progress over the past 12 months, from London to Berlin, has been revelatory: four relay finals, three golds, and not a single baton spilled.

Such perfectionism permeates down to the individual sprints. In analysing Asher-smith’s 100m time of 10.92 in Oslo in June, then a national record, Blackie insisted that he preferred her display in Stockholm – a hundredth of a second slower – as she showed better physical form.

Jennings, for her part, does not anticipate those standards slipping. “I was team leader when she wore her first GB vest, at the European Youth Olympics in Turkey,” she says. “She was disqualified for a false start in the 200. But she didn’t let it define her career. She is incredibly determined. Since she was 16, her education was always paramount. It was never an option that she wouldn’t go to university. In retrospect, it was perhaps the best thing for her, making sure that she didn’t jump into the full-time athlete model, which a lot of people can’t deal with.”

There is still ample reason to be cautious. Jodie Williams was a world junior champion and has all but disappeared without trace as a serious senior contender. James Dasaolu quickened pulses when he became the European 100m champion in Zurich in 2014, only to be embarrassed at the worlds the following summer, when he finished fourth in his heat after blithely supposing he could just jog through the line.

Such presumptuousness is anathema to today’s British regime, where sprinters are encouraged to respect opponents and not to be seduced by false dawns. Gone is the arrogance of Lewis-francis, and in its place is the poise of Zharnel Hughes, who has observed the instruction of former training partner Usain Bolt to “stay focused and stay humble”.

The road to Tokyo 2020 is long and fraught with danger, but the signs are that Britain’s fastest men and women have finally found the right blend.