Wayde van Niekerk due a little luck as he chases World Champs redemption

The enduring memory of a race etched in the consciousness of every athletics-minded South African - Wayde van Niekerk's Olympic 400m final in 2016 - is one of the commentators thinking the world record holder is flagging on the final straight before exclaiming "he's pulling away!".

Looking at Van Niekerk's semi-final at the ongoing World Championships in Budapest on Tuesday night, it was difficult not to conclude that he has lost that ability to dig a little deeper and kick decisively in the final straight as Antonio Watson and Vernon Norwood swallowed him up in a fast race.

Whether that is as a result of age or the lingering effects of his serious knee injury in 2017 is a case of the truth being somewhere in the middle, but on Tuesday he didn't look like an athlete with a miraculous extra gear in reserve like he used to six years ago.

Going into the race, being in lane eight - the same lane from which he won Olympic gold and shattered the world record in Rio - was seen as being a good omen after years of uncertainty following his serious knee injury in 2017.

The catch with lane eight has always been that, because you can't see the other athletes from the outskirts of the track, you have to run like a madman and hope you're in front when the dust settles on the final straight.

Van Niekerk, who had enjoyed using Great Britain's Matthew Hudson-Smith as a measure of where he should be in his heat because he could see him for the entirety of the race, resorted to his 2016 tactics and the body seemed to remind him he was seven years older as he finished in third place and in a time of 44.65sec in third place - outside automatic qualification.

READ | Van Niekerk scrapes into World Champs finals

What followed was Van Niekerk