Dina Asher-Smith: ‘You can’t run fast with baggage – you gotta throw it out’

“Any time someone mentioned it, I just burst into tears,” says Dina Asher-Smith, with a rawness that stings and lingers. “It was really weird. It was kind of uncontrollable.”

Everyone thinks they know the story of Asher-Smith’s Tokyo Olympics a year ago. How she arrived in Japan as a Team GB poster girl, only to have her dreams of gold eviscerated by a hamstring injury far more serious than she had let on. But on the eve of the world championships in Eugene, Britain’s greatest sprinter bravely reveals that was only the half of it.

“Before Tokyo I didn’t have time to grapple with my emotions, because you can’t be crying your way through rehab,” she says. “And after I didn’t make the 100m final, I still wanted to put my best put forward in the relay. But then …”

Suddenly it all comes tumbling out. How she cried when the nice man from the Telegraph spoke to her after a race in Paris – “I still feel so sorry for him, I just burst into tears when he asked me about Tokyo” – as well as on multiple other occasions. But the real kicker came at the end of a season drenched in pain and heartbreak when she went toe-to-toe with the Olympic champion, Elaine Thompson‑Herah, in the Diamond League final in September. She came second in 10.87sec – just shy of her British record – and realised that her superpowers had returned too late.

“Ironically, as I was running 10.9, 10.8 at the end of the season, my coaches said: ‘You know, if you kept going into October you’d run even faster,’” she says. “I started crying. I knew it. I was so upset. But I got through it.”

And as Asher-Smith makes her final preparations for Eugene, where she will run in the 100m this weekend, defend her 200m title and compete in the 4x100m relay, she insists she is