ASHER TO...ASHES
Dina’s tears: A few weeks ago I was still on crutches but couldn’t let dream go
WHEN the truth could finally be told, the tears flowed out of Dina Asher-Smith.
The face of Britain’s Olympic team had just seen a lifelong dream turn to dust through an injury she had hidden and secretly nursed for five weeks.
She had tried so hard to convince herself that just a month after tearing her hamstring she could conquer the world.
She refused to chuck the towel in, despite having only just come off crutches.
She had clung to the champion’s mentality that if she only got to the startline in one piece magic could still happen.
On an uncomfortably warm evening in Tokyo, Asher-Smith’s best of intentions only added to the heartache and pain.
She did not ‘narrowly miss’ becoming 100m champion. She failed to even make the final. Her third-place semi-final yesterday confirmed what Friday’s heat had suggested: she was lame, a shadow of her best self.
Only now could she reveal the nightmare ordeal she had lived through since the Olympic trials.
“It’s been a crazy, intense, heartbreaking period,” said Britain’s fastest woman, who will now not run in the 200m.
“I was in the shape of my life. Without a doubt. I’m not trying to sound arrogant but that is where I was. I tore my hamstring at 60 metres in the British Championship final, shut down and still ran 10.97sec.”
That was June 26. That day she was told it was a rupture – “That my hamstring and tendon were no longer attached. That I would need surgery. That it would be three or four months until I could walk again, then a year to sprinting.
“I was in floods of tears – I had a statement written, saying why I wasn’t going to be selected.” Before she pressed ‘send’ she decided to put in a call to HansWilhelm Muller-Wohlfahrt, the German doctor recognised as the best in the business.
“I wanted to get an opinion on what kind of surgery I should have,” Asher-Smith said. “If there was some hamstring left or whether I should have a plastic or metal attachment.”
Muller-Wohlfahrt responded that while it was indeed torn, he could get her to Tokyo.
Asher-Smith deleted her withdrawal email, begged the selectors to hold her spot and boarded a flight to Munich.
“I was on crutches, off crutches, learning how to fully extend it again,” she said. “Walk, drills, jog, run. All the time counting down.”
She returned to the UK, flew to Tokyo on Tuesday last week and the following day put spikes on for the first time.
Seen in that light she did an incredible
job to run an 11.05sec semifinal. But being close yet so far only hurt more.
It left her on the outside looking in, watching her great pal Daryll Neita in the final, as Elaine Thompson-Herah wrote her way into history by breaking Florence Griffith Joyner’s 33year old Olympic record.
Thompson-Herah led a Jamaican 1-2-3, with victory in a stunning 10.61sec – beating FloJo’s 10.62sec with the secondfastest time in history – from Shelly-Ann Fraser-Pryce in 10.74sec and Shericka
Jackson on 10.76sec. Neita was eighth in 11.12sec.
Asher-Smith sighed: “The easiest thing would have been to turn around and say I’m not going to get on the plane. That would have saved my pride, it would have saved everything.
“But I’m an incredibly talented sprinter and I know what kind of calibre of athlete I am.
“I’d been dreaming about this for so long that, unless I couldn’t stand on the leg or do anything, it wasn’t an option for me to pull out. This is my life.”