Dina Asher-Smith running 60m in Torun
Dina Asher-Smith will line-up in the 60m in the World Indoor Championships at the end of this week. It will be her first appearance in a World Indoors for 10 years, since being a semi-finalist in Portland. In 2015 she took a silver in the European Indoors.
Dina has got a new coach this year. In 2023 she left her coach of 19 years, John Blackie, to join Edrick Floreal in Austin Texas. After two years she returned to London but has now re-located to at Baylor University in Waco, Texas to work with Michael Ford.
When I spoke to her last week I asked her about her decision to run an Indoor Championship for the first time in ages. She told me: “I’m just having fun, if I’m being honest. I run 100, 200, the occasional 400 – I think I probably will run a 400 outdoors soon because straight after World Indoors, the relays meets in America will start. I need to have a conversation, but it might seem me running a 400 soon. That’s a hot topic at training with everyone. So as you can imagine, that’s going down a treat with the short sprinters. But with the 60m, I’ve just been having fun. I definitely had my own goals going in, but as I said, it was just quite fluid, because as you go into a new situation, you have to have scope for there to be setbacks or things just not going according to plan. Everybody can work with their best intentions, but that just might happen in a new situation, but it’s been fun so far. So I’ve just been enjoying it and having fun. I’ve always been a great starter and I’ve gone to first leg on the relay in recent years, I’ve just had some really fun opportunities with the start there”.
So far this year she has run 7.08 to win at the New Balance Indoor Grand Prix in Boston, followed by a 7.10 victory at the Millrose Games in New York and 7.05 to win the GB Champs. She said of the GB win: “I am really happy with that time. Ultimately, I came here to win, to put together a good performance, and run a good Championship, so I am glad I have been able to build through the rounds. 7.0 is always great, so I am really happy. The women’s sprints have been a highlight for the last decade now; there is a different Championship winner every year, and we are all running incredible times. There is so much talent around. As an athlete it always makes you bring your A game to any race you run”.
She is enjoying being back in Texas, describing Coach Ford as “very nice, very relaxed very kind and everything makes a lot of sense and that’s all you really want as an athlete isn’t it ? That’s what you want as a person in life as well just it’s not yeah that’s it really and sometimes that’s just all you need all you ask for”. She added that chasing after Trayvon Bromell in training was not always fun!
On her approach to the season as a mature athlete she said: ”I think it’s credit to my new coach’s temperament and the environment that he creates. When you get to a certain point in your career you recognize the importance of the relationship that you have. Obviously, I have my own goals and my own aims coming into the season. I’m really happy to be in a position where I can chase them coming into the World Indoor Championships. But at the same time, there’s no stress, no pressure. Everything is very much directed to how do you want your career to go? What athlete do you want to be? What events do you want to run? What makes sense for you? And I’ve really enjoyed that and I’ve enjoyed the fluidity of it. So we were just navigating the indoor season, in a new partnership. I had my own goals, but also very aware that when you’re in a new partnership, and a new training programme, in a new training venue, things don’t always go 100% to plan. So everything was very much just fluid and evolving as we went on. And I’m just grateful that we’re in a place where the fluidity and evolution of our indoor season has led us to being in a good position going into the World Indoor Championships”.
And as Laura Muir says, “a happy athlete is a fast athlete”.
