Team GB’s poster girl reveals her secret attempts to get fit before Tokyo in the wake of her 100m semi-final heartbreak
Tokyo blues. Dina Asher-Smith did pretty well, all things considered, to keep it together for the opening minute and seven seconds of a startlingly raw post-race debrief in the bowels of the Olympic Stadium, and fresh from elimination in the semi-final of the 100 metres.
The past five weeks have, it turns out, been an extraordinary story of cloak and dagger rehab for the fastest British woman ever to take to the track. On 26 June Asher-Smith felt a pop in her hamstring en route to winning the Team GB trials in Manchester in a time of 10.97sec. As she told the gathered journalists in that Tokyo hanger, “You were all looking at the clock, you didn’t know what the story was.”