TOkyo blues. All in all, Dina Asher-Smith did pretty well to hold it together in the first minute and seven seconds of a startlingly raw post-race debriefing in the bowels of the Olympic Stadium, and fresh from elimination in the 100 meter semifinals.
As it turned out, the past five weeks have been an extraordinary story of rehab for the fastest British woman to ever hit the racetrack. On June 26th, Asher-Smith felt a hamstring crack in a time of 10.97 seconds on the way to victory at Team GB Trial in Manchester. When she said to the assembled journalists in this Tokyo coat hanger: “You all looked at the clock, you didn’t know what the story was.”
What followed was a hair-raising story that was previously hidden behind a facade of public positivity, of misdiagnosed breaks, abandoned KFC feasts, pleadings at the airport terminal, crutches in the hotel lobby, the holistic healing hands of Hans-Wilhelm Müller-Wohlfahrt, and from there a month of fear, doubt and hope.
It took 20 minutes to tell the story in Tokyo, mixed with tearful moments, a few laughs and the feeling that something was finally allowed to happen. This path had led Asher-Smith to the finish line of her 100-meter semi-final. But no further in the end.
On Friday evening, she had the feeling that something was going wrong in her 100-meter run. So much so that at least one journalist present tried to confirm the rumors of a serious injury to the Team GB media staff only to learn that everything was fine.
Sprinters often keep their cards close together and even show a little in those early laps. Asher-Smith had been in the shape of her life when she went to Manchester, but she looked strangely timid in Tokyo.
There was a noticeable change on Saturday night. Asher-Smith had dyed the ends of her hair blue, a touch of the captain’s GB flag, who, frankly, probably needed a bit of relief at this point. She looked tense. But then again, this may have been the best women’s 100m field ever put together.
Two lanes of traffic over Elaine Thompson-Herah stretched and peered along the line. Two hours later, she would keep her Rio gold, an exciting mix of balance and strength, as she landed in an Olympic record time. Asher-Smith has only been back at his best for a week. Last month she thought she wasn’t here at all. She stood with her hand on her hips, then crouched against the blocks.
The start was fair. The transition into her running looked smooth enough from the track. Later, however, Asher-Smith would talk about the pain she felt during these shifts. And now Thompson-Herah was already on the road and let the automatic transmission up, the kind of acceleration that does without edges or kinks in the curve. After 50 yards and the closing field around her, Asher-Smith reached a point where the ignition simply had to come.
The way things had worked after Manchester sounded really messy. Immediately after the trials, Asher-Smith had a “ready to answer my phone” statement withdrawing from the Tokyo Games. Only when she sent her scans to Germany and gave Müller-Wohlfahrt some hope did she put away the comfort food, got her head back into the game and, with desperate news on an undercover sprint through the Covid travel hell, told the voters not to exclude them , in a tense, tender and obviously very disorienting time of hope for reality.
On the track in that semi-final, Asher-Smith looked for the climb, the state in which an athlete relaxes and feels the speed begin. Except here not. She struggled, struggled with her body and squeezed it, if she just broke it, she broke the spell. Did she know that her race here ran at 50 meters?
“No, I don’t think so. I’m an athlete who believes that it doesn’t matter what happens, you have to keep believing in it. ”And she carried on. The suggestion from the British camp is that Asher-Smith had already had time to “mourn” her own Olympics from the tightrope act of the past five weeks. But here, too, there is room for a certain satisfaction.
She still ran for 11.05 seconds on a fully functional stage, but was pushed to third place by Ajla Del Ponte from Switzerland. There was a grimace as Asher-Smith walked off the track, realizing there was little chance of making it as one of the two fastest finishers outside of the first two to get through each semi-finals.
Obviously there was a sense of liberation too. The pressure to perform is enormous here. Seb Coe called her somewhat unhelpfully “the figurehead” of these games, and Asher-Smith came to Tokyo as the leading athletics medal hope with the chance of becoming the first British female Olympic medalist not named “Dorothy” ” (Dorothy Manley won silver at the 1948 Games, Dorothy Hyman won silver in Rome in 1960).
The British women’s sprint was not a winning machine. She raised this discipline at the age of 25, and her collection of medals is already an outlier. And, of course, Asher-Smith has used this platform to become a powerful public voice, from discussing structural racism with readers of the Daily Telegraph to emphasizing the critical importance that young girls keep exercising when so many are in school abort.
Did she think of just saying no, sitting it out, letting go of the pressure? “The simplest thing would have been to say that I wouldn’t get on a plane, that would have saved my pride, it would have saved everything.”
Asher-Smith has a five year plan, quick sales from here from Worlds, Europeans and Olympics. This was a blue band moment on this trip. But all is not lost, including your pride, just a race that was driven with not a little courage against the Olympic splendor.
