It shouldn’t be such a taboo to say I want to win
Neita eyes golden summer after leaving Dina’s shadow
IT IS SOMETHING of an irony that nothing ever came quickly for the woman who currently ranks as the fastest in Britain. ‘It’s just taken me a very, very long time to find my flow,’ Daryll Neita tells The Mail on Sunday. ‘I was never on that path where it happened the perfect way.’
There can be deeper satisfactions in the successes that take longer to arrive and at the age of 25 Neita has finally tasted such vindication in the past fortnight.
When she boarded her flight to the US for the World Championships, which begin in Eugene on Friday, she did so on the back of winning both the 100 and 200 metres titles at the British trials. As she puts it: ‘This is my time. I am not setting any limit at all on what I can do.’
The significance in all that was well documented at the trials, given Neita’s prime obstacle to the top step of the 100m was the same obstacle she has been encountering since she was seven years old — Dina Asher-Smith.
They each speak of being friends as well as relay colleagues who have won Olympic, world and European medals together, but it is a brutal truth that the prodigious successes of Asher-Smith through childhood, followed by her greater wins as a professional, have cast an awful lot of shade over Neita for a long time.
After probing at the boundaries for the better part of a year in which Neita made the Olympic final ahead of an injured AsherSmith in Tokyo, she finally broke free of that shadow at the trials.
‘I can’t tell you how over the moon I’ve been,’ she says. ‘That’s not because of who I have beaten — it’s about me and getting what I have wanted.
‘They might even be my first individual medals. I’m
not even sure I got anything at juniors. To go to the British championships, get a double gold, was just incredible because it just feels like I’m back on the right path where I know I should be.
‘The only way for me is upwards. I do feel like last year was my breakthrough season and I think it was great for me to get on that level, reaching the Olympic final, and once I was there, I realised I really do belong here. I’ve just got no limits. These wins follow that, because there have been setbacks. Now I have my medals and I can
put them on this little display I have at home for trophies and memories and stuff and I know I just want to add more and more.
‘Now that I’ve seen gold that’s the colour I like.’
Neita’s success had been increasingly trailed across the past year, in which her individual results indicated she can compete at world level beyond the relays. Aside from reaching the Olympic 100m final, she has also gone beneath the 11sec barrier in that period, with a personal best of 10.93sec set in losing to Asher-Smith in Zurich last September.
What makes the rise surprising is it has come at a time of immense turbulence in her professional life, given she was part of Rana Reider’s training group in Florida until the start of this year. She left for a new base in
Italy after being handed an ultimatum by UK Athletics owing to an investigation into sexual misconduct by the coach, with Raider’s lawyer previously labelling the claims as ‘unvetted’ and ‘unproven’.
Neita did not go quietly, accusing UKA of ‘blackmail’ in the same explosive interview at the World Indoor Championships in Belgrade that included a furious criticism of her former training partner, Nigeria’s Blessing Okagbare, who had tested positive for drugs in Tokyo.
‘That whole thing [around leaving Reider] was upsetting,’ she says.
‘I think it showed me that it’s sport and you can get brought into things that do not concern you. When I spoke about it in Belgrade, it was because I didn’t want to carry any more of that kind of negativity into what I’m doing.
‘It wasn’t nice. But you just have to stay true to yourself. I really believed that at the other end there can be great things and there have been. I have been telling myself that a lot.
‘Getting stronger mentally has been a big thing for me, even away from that situation. It started during the pandemic and has probably been the biggest reason for my results. I realised I wanted more for myself.’
What happens next will be fascinating. While the extreme depth of women’s sprinting makes a medal at the worlds unlikely — not a view Neita necessarily subscribes to — there will be stronger opportunities this summer when she competes at the Commonwealth Games and European Championships.
‘I definitely hope to be able to be on podiums,’ she says. ‘It shouldn’t be such like a taboo thing to say that I want to win.’ Even if she does not, there will be the domestic interest of seeing how an old rival responds to the challenge posed by Neita.
‘Dina and I have been racing each other since I was about seven and she was eight,’ says Neita. ‘Our clubs were only about 20 minutes apart [in south-east London].
‘She’s an amazing athlete, a world champion, and she’s been on a different path. It’s nice because our journeys were so different, but I feel like I’m catching up to where I should be.
‘She said it to me at trials that I can do it — she’s always encouraged me. We both want to challenge the world. And we can do that.’