Dina Asher-Smith facing selection battle for World Championships
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Version 0 of 1. British teenage sprint sensation Dina Asher-Smith believes she faces a fight to qualify for the 100m and 200m at the World Championships in Beijing despite becoming the fastest teenager in history over 60m earlier this month. The 19-year-old Asher-Smith confirmed her status as one of brightest young talents in world athletics by winning silver in the 60m at the European Indoor Championships in Prague, but she says she is taking nothing for granted in the outdoor season because of the “hotbed” of young talent in British sprinting – including Jodie Williams, Asha Philip, Bianca Williams, Ashleigh Nelson and Desiree Henry. “I don’t think Prague has really sunk in – but I don’t really want it to because I just want to keep my form rolling into the outdoor season,” she admitted. “My goal is to be at the world championships in Beijing and compete in the Bird’s Nest. But I could be running lifetime bests and running fantastically well but I still might not an individual berth in the 100m or 200m simply because we have such a hotbed of talent in the UK.” Asher-Smith, a first-year history student at King’s College, London, also confirmed that she would miss competing for Britain in the IAAF World Relays in the Bahamas in May because of an exam on power, culture and belief in early modern Europe from 1400-1800 the following day. However she does intend to race on the prestigious Diamond League circuit for the first time to test herself against the fastest women on the planet. “I’m too chilled to be like ‘Oh my god’ I’m racing against [100m Olympic champion] Shelly-Ann Fraser-Pryce but it would be a valuable experience to get the phases of my race right under pressure,” she said. “As an athlete that is what you have to work on essentially, the Olympics is won by people who can keep their cool.” Asher-Smith, who was speaking at the launch of UK Sport’s ‘We Need You Campaign’ to mark 500 days to go before the Rio 2016 Olympics, also revealed that carrying kit on Super Saturday as a 16-year-old at London 2012 had inspired her to want to be an Olympian. “I was lucky enough to carry the athletes’ boxes on Super Saturday and that was really special,” she said. “We knew Greg Rutherford, Mo Farah and Jess Ennis-Hill were competing but we didn’t know it was going to become one of the great British sporting moments. I saw Katarina Johnson-Thompson on the infield and said ‘Hi’ because we had just been to the world junior championships together and she was like ‘What are you doing there?’ I was like ‘I really can’t stay and talk!’But that night was really special and it inspired me to become an Olympian. “The weird thing is, the box carriers were invited back for the Anniversary Games in 2013, but by then I was competing in the 4x100m relay. I knew all the tunnels under the Olympic stadium but all of a sudden I was being led a different way because I was an athlete. I was thinking; there’s a short cut that way, why don’t you go over there?” Much to the bemusement of her relay colleagues, Asher-Smith then got chatting to her old colleagues just before she raced. “I saw my friends carrying the boxes and I was like ‘Hi!’ The relay girls were looking at me, so I had to explain - that was me last year!” |