TWIN IT TO WIN IT!
The sprinting sensations who show GB are ...
BOTH the Hylton and Nielsen twins are naturals in front of the camera, telling jokes to make the others smile. ‘What do you call a deer with no eyes?’ asks one. ‘ No idea,’ she squeals and all four burst into a fit of giggles. ‘Do you know any athletics jokes?’
Sportsmail’s photographer Andy Hooper asks. ‘Yeah . . . Justin Gatlin,’ says Lina Nielsen without missing a beat, poking fun at the twice banned drugs cheat now threatening to topple Usain Bolt. The future of British sprinting is not just identical but fiercely quick-witted.
Spectators at last month’s Loughborough International meeting may have thought they were seeing double or even quadruple as both sets of twins — 18-year-olds Shannon and Cheriece Hylton and Laviai and Lina Nielsen, 19 — impressed.
Shannon won the 200metres, beating Olympian Margaret Adeoye with a personal best of 22.94sec, making her the fifth fastest British junior of all-time.
The Hyltons — who compete this weekend at the Mannheim Bauhaus Junioren- Gala in Germany — were first and second over 200m at the British Indoor Championships earlier this year and have shared the podium in age group races across the country since they were young teenagers.
Laviai, who is the fastest junior in the world this year over 400m, and sister Lina came to athletics later, inspired by being kit carriers at the London 2012 Olympics.
‘I stood behind Jessica Ennis and when she came out the crowd cheering was the loudest thing I’ve heard in my life,’ says Laviai. ‘I thought, “I want that”. I was worried about getting muscular from athletics when I was younger but Jess showed me that you can be beautiful and inspirational.
‘At Alexandra Palace where we go hill training, you can see the Olympic Park and when we get to the top we turn to each other and say “that’s the dream”. Before London 2012 we were training once a week for fun and just showing up for competitions but it was a game-changer.’
They now do three track sessions and two gym sessions a week with their coach, Frank Adams, at Enfield and Haringey Athletics Club. Laviai has sliced more than five seconds off her 400m personal best over the past two seasons. Her 52.25sec run to win a 400m invitational race in Namur, Belgium, last month is also the quickest a British under 20 has run for 33 years.
But Lina, who used to be an 800m runner before switching to one lap, is hard on her heels. ‘Last year for me it was a pretty average season,’ she says. ‘Watching Laviai compete I really wanted to be there. I used her as my inspiration, I said “we have the same genetic make-up and why am I not there?”’
Their coach Adams is encouraged by their rapid progress. ‘They’ve both made huge breakthroughs over the past two seasons and there’s so much more to come so we’re seriously looking at the Tokyo 2020 Olympics. Often twins don’t want to compete against each other but they’re happy to do that. They’re the first to congratulate each other at the finish line.’
THEIRsuccess is particularly impressive considering all are balancing demands of training regimes with education.
The Hyltons have been studying for A-levels at Bullers Wood School in Bromley and both are predicted to get excellent results. The Nielsens, who got identical A-level results of A,A, B last year, are both in the first year of university.
‘We went on warm-weather training to Portugal in April,’ says Lina, who studies chemistry at Queen Mary University in London. ‘There was a big window in the living room so I got some marker pens and said to my training group, “Guys, I’m going to give you a lecture on spectroscopy”. I wrote loads of equations on the window but I don’t think they understood much of it.’
‘That’s when I realised she was really smart,’ interjects Laviai, who reads geography at King’s College London. ‘A lot of athletes do sports science, but studying geography takes the focus away from the pres- sure I’m putting on myself in athletics and helps with discipline because you know if you don’t get your work done, you can’t go training.’
The Hyltons’ first love was amateur dramatics and they used to perform pantomimes at the Broadway Theatre in Catford, south-east London.
‘Our parents didn’t come from much but made something of themselves,’ says Shannon. ‘They didn’t get the chance to go to university and wanted to give us all the opportunities they didn’t have so took us to all the classes.’
The Hyltons do almost everything together and even have an identical allergy to eggs, nuts and white fish. ‘It makes it quite difficult to get the protein we need for training,’ says Cheriece. ‘ For our birthday we got an eggless cake but we were even allergic to that!’
They habitually finish each other’s sentences and say they rarely argue. ‘If we do it’s about who’s going to upload a picture to Instagram first,’ says Shannon. ‘But if we do rock, paper, scissors to decide, Cheriece always loses so we’re going to have to think of something different.’
By the time the photo session is over, Laviai Nielsen is shivering so her twin wraps an arm round her for warmth. The Hyltons link arms and the four of them walk away together, giggling, the future of British sprinting looking doubly bright.