Tokyo Olympics – Dina Asher-Smith bravely recounted how injury wrecked her dreams of gold

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After so much anticipation about Dina Asher-Smith’s bid to establish her name in sprinting history as the first British winner of the Olympic women’s 100m, after so much talk about how, for the first time in 21 years, the race was going to upstage the men’s 100m, the blue-riband event of the Tokyo Games burst into life last night. Unfortunately, Asher-Smith was not in it.

She was not there when the lights went down at the Olympic Stadium a few minutes before 10pm local time.

She was not there when the straight was lit up like a runway in the darkness. 

She was not there when her rivals Shelly-Ann Fraser-Pryce and Elaine Thompson-Herah were introduced to the empty arena. She was not there when Thompson-Herah hurtled across the line first in a new Olympic record time.

Instead, Asher-Smith was downstairs in an underground car park that has been converted into an area where athletes speak to the media, her emotions oscillating wildly between tears and laughter, her words pouring forth in an animated 20-minute stream of consciousness as she sought to explain where it went wrong.

This was the woman who was supposed to be the golden girl of these Olympics for Team GB, talking us through the agony of failing to qualify for the final after finishing third in her semi-final and missing out by five hundredths of a second on sneaking in to the event she had dreamed of competing in, as a fastest loser. She was out of the 200m, her favoured event, too, she said.

The words kept spilling out. Asher-Smith was Team GB’s best hope of gold on the track and now that hope was ruined.

It was as if, if she spoke quickly enough, her thoughts might outrun the pain of her broken dreams.

She had won a silver in the event at the World Championships in Doha two years ago, she said, and she had believed she could go one better on the biggest stage of all.

All sorts of dread must have been coursing through her mind. She is 25 now and at her peak. Maybe by the time Paris comes around in 2024, her best may be behind her. But she kept speaking. She had not been able to do herself justice on the track but this was a brave performance in front of massed ranks of microphones gathered to record her heartbreak.

She had damaged her hamstring in the British Olympic trials in Manchester on June 26 when she appeared to win the 100m comfortably, she said. She had not told anyone but her closest friends. ‘Dina Asher-Smith breezes to win,’ the headlines had said later that evening but they did not tell the story. If only they had known the truth, Asher-Smith said.

She had been in the form of her life, she said, but now she had been told she had ruptured her hamstring. She would need an operation and it would be four months until she walked again and a year until she sprinted again. She was in floods of tears, she said.

But later she was told there might be hope, that she might not need surgery, that she might make it to the start here after all. At that point, she clasped her hands together, as if in prayer. 

For a minute, she could not speak. Then she began to cry. She composed herself and began again. She talked about a chaotic scene at Heathrow, desperately trying to persuade British Airways to allow her to fly to Munich, to get treatment at the clinic of the renowned physician, Hans-Wilhelm Muller-Wohlfahrt, who had given her the revised diagnosis. 

She talked about the negotiations and how, in the end, she was cleared to fly to Germany.

She clung to little pieces of hope. She was still intending to run in the 100m relay later this week, she said, and someone ventured that if she were able to win a medal in that, what a triumph it would be. ‘It would be great, it would be great, it would be great,’ she said, as if by repeating it, it might happen.

She broke down again before talking about the treatment she got in Germany. She talked about rest and recuperation. She went through the hopes she harboured she might recover in time, she went through the emotions that assailed her.

‘I was on crutches, off crutches, learning how to fully extend it again, walk, drills, jog, run,’ she said. ‘We’re counting down. They tried so, so hard with me every day. We came back to the UK, as it was time to fly to Tokyo. 

‘I came here on July 20 and put on spikes on the 21st. It’s been a crazy, intense and heart-breaking period. I was in the shape of my life. Without a doubt. I’m not trying to sound arrogant but that is where I was.’

She broke down again. But she still wanted to explain why she had tried so hard to make it to the final. ‘The easiest thing,’ she said, ‘would have been to turn around and say: “I’m not going to get on the plane.” That would have saved my pride.

‘But I’m an incredibly talented sprinter and I know what kind of calibre of athlete I am. I’ve been dreaming about this for so long. Unless I couldn’t stand or do anything on that leg, it wasn’t an option for me to give up because this is what… my life.’

This is her life and it was hard to see her talking about how the dream of gold in Tokyo had broken apart. She kept talking. 

Perhaps she knew that when she stopped, when she got back to a quiet place with no voices and no questions and only her thoughts.

She said one last thing when asked about a speech she had given, as captain of the Team GB athletics squad, to the other athletes in Tokyo. ‘I said that the future is completely unwritten,’ she said. 

‘When you stand on the line it doesn’t matter what’s going on next to you, the reason why the lane or the runway in front of us is empty, or the throwing circle, is because it’s up to all of us to write what our story is. 

‘All those other people might have done amazing things in the past but the past does not dictate the future.’

Except this time, Asher-Smith’s past did dictate her future. 

An injury, ‘a poorly-timed injury’, she called it, shattered her dreams and sunk our golden girl before her Games had even started, and left her in this underground car park while the queens of the track raced on without her to glory.