Greg Allen: Rhasidat Adeleke in perfect position to peak for Paris

Rhasidat Adeleke has been competing at the University of Texas for two years. She has been at the beck and call of their racing demands since her first race of the year on 21 January: 35 races, 20 of them over 400 metres.

That’s an enormously demanding season.

Context is everything, as they say, so there is the key context for last night's fourth place finish for Adeleke.

So she was operating off relative fumes of fuel left in the tank for last night's 400m final in Budapest.

However the decision to turn professional last month means she can now formulate her own schedule from here on, because she no longer runs on a roster for the University of Texas.

In essence, Rhasidat’s peak for this season was the American Collegiate (NCAA) final ten weeks ago, where she was the shock winner in 49.20 seconds - almost a full second quicker than she ran last night.

That’s about eight metres difference in terms of track. With that time, if she could have been as fresh as she was in June, she would have won silver last night. She know’s that, she actually referenced that exact fact last night.

For further context, to win the NCAA championships is huge. Her own winning time was faster than last year’s European Championships gold medal performance.

She only turns 21 on Tuesday. She’s only one place off the medal rostrum here despite being clearly well off her peak for the season, so with a fresh schedule geared towards purely peaking for the Olympics next year, she’s on course to challenge more seriously for a medal in Paris.

Other athletes around her then will come into the equation, others around her will similarly improve, and there’s no guarantee that she will line up against even half the field that competed last night.

But she’s poised to be