Dina doubles up, but she’s not done yet
Sprint queen targets historic treble after adding 200m to 100m crown
TWO gold medals, two world-leading times and countless possibilities that will now go way beyond a Berlin hat-trick. Indeed, a treble may have been the aim when Dina Asher- Smith arrived for these European Championships, but her realistic goals ought to go far further afield.
Anything less would be to play down the flame-heeled brilliance of what she has shown this week, starting with her 10.85sec gold medal in the 100m on Tuesday and continuing with what was an even better performance last night.
Quite simply, she was incredible, covering the 200m in 21.89sec to defend the title she won in 2016. On one level, that meant obliterating her own British record, just as she did in the shorter distance, but what also of crushing a double world champion in Dafne Schippers for the second time in four days? And what of the world list, of which she is now top for two marquee distances? Extraordinary.
Schippers, for her part a winner of 13 medals from Olympics to Europeans, was beaten by the first bend. She ran a season’s best 22.14sec and was still second. Jamile Samuel, of Holland, was third, and Brits Bianca Williams and Beth Dobbin came in sixth and seventh.
Of course, the team-mate who finished a street ahead isn’t quite done yet. Tonight she will contest the 4x100m relay, for which Britain are huge favourites, but that would be a small cherry on what is a fairly large cake. The likely win will give her a piece of history as the first Brit to win three golds at this level, but it won’t tell us more than we already know, which is that this 22year-old is one of the finest sprint talents on the planet and the leading athlete in the British team on its long runway to Tokyo 2020.
A degree of caution is necessary at this point, of course, because even though Schippers is a scalp of the highest order, and one the Londoner has now taken twice, the fields here were naturally weaker than what Asher-Smith will find at the worlds in Doha next year and beyond at Tokyo. It was also her own admission after her 100m world-lead of 10.85sec that athletes outside of the Commonwealth and Europe may not have approached 2018 with the same zeal as she has in preparation for two significant championships.
For that reason, the fascination in the coming two years will be in seeing how Asher-Smith measures up, with her British records for the 100 (10.85sec) and 200 (21.89sec down from 22.07sec) currently good enough for joint sixth and third in the world respectively in the past two years, if you broaden the sample out to take in the season of the 2017 world championships.
That offers a wider illustration of where she stands, and indeed the challenge she faces as part of a select group of British athletes with Laura Muir, Katarina Johnson- Thompson, Lorraine Ugen, Zharnel Hughes and Reece Prescod who might currently be consid- ered potential medal contenders in this Olympic cycle. Mo Farah would also join that list if marathon results continue on an upward curve.
The desperation for new prospects was made abundantly clear at London 2017. Farah was the only individual medallist outside of the relays in the capital and while the team hit its target, the outcome of those championships ought to have been desperately worrying for performance director Neil Black. Against that backdrop, Asher-Smith’s consistency as a championship runner is one of the few trump cards he can play, because she now has 10 individual and relay medals across the Commonwealth Games, Europeans (indoors and out), World Championships and Olympics. It might well have been more considering she was fourth in the 200m at the worlds last year, having missed most of the season with her broken foot. Her recovery has now placed her at the front of what Black will hope is a British recovery at world level.
Meanwhile, Shara Proctor added another medal for Britain, securing bronze in the long jump final. Ugen, who ranks No 1 in the world this year, flopped in the long jump final. She sat ninth after two jumps with only the top eight advancing to the next three jumps, but fouled her final attempt.
Laviai Nielsen, the former European junior champion and part of the 4x400m team that took world silver last year, was fourth in the 400m final. The 22-year-old, who like Asher-Smith was a kit box carrier at London 2012, qualified fastest but finished half a second shy of bronze in 51.21sec.
Earlier, Tom Bosworth finished a disappointing seventh in the 20km race walk and afterwards accused three of his rivals of ‘running’.
It was an underwhelming result for a man who holds the one-mile world record and was sixth at the Rio Olympics. He led after 15km, but fell back and crossed in 1:21:31, 49 seconds behind winner Alvaro Martin, of Spain. Bosworth said: ‘I’m really annoyed that I saw three guys ahead of me literally run round the bends. That p***** me off because that’s just bad. I’m not going to name names but it’s going to be on camera. It’s poor form.’