Journey to the top has been worth the wait for Neita
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 satisfaction in the successes that take longer to arrive — and at the age of 25, Neita (below) 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 100metres and 200m 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 Asher-Smith 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. These are my first individual medals or golds at senior level.
‘To go to the British Championships, get a double gold, was just incredible because it 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 realised I really do belong here. I’ve just got no limits.
‘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.’
Aside from reaching the Olympic 100m final, Neita has also gone beneath the 11-seconds barrier in the past year, with a personal best of 10.93sec set in losing to Asher-Smith in Zurich last September.
What makes her rise surprising is that 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’. She explains: ‘That whole thing (around leaving Reider) was upsetting. I think it showed me that it’s sport and you can get brought into things that do not concern you.
‘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 has been. I have been telling myself that a lot.’