Dina Asher-Smith knew she was onto something when she reduced her coach to tears in Berlin last year.
John Blackie is not given to great shows of emotion but that day at the European Championships he found himself wiping his eyes.
They had gone to Germany to find out whether she could cope with the demands of doubling up in the 100 and 200 metres at a major champs.
Blackie was already looking ahead. It was not about European glory. He was plotting a global assault, first the Doha Worlds then the Tokyo Olympics.
“Dina had won the 100 two days earlier and we’d talked about how she should approach the 200,” he said.
“She ran it exactly as we discussed, things happened just as we thought and when she crossed the line I was in tears at how well she’d executed.
“Trust me I don’t break down in tears too often, I’m usually pretty circumspect, I take things in my stride. But when you see something close to perfection like that…”
He knew then that the Doha double was on although, in truth, he had suspected from the very start that Asher-Smith was a once-in-a-generation talent.
“When I first met Dina she was nine and you could tell she had something,” he recalled. “You didn’t now what that something was, or how she’d turn out, but she looked special.
“Younger athletes tend to want to be the best tomorrow, even today, I try to instil in them the fact you have to be patient, you have to work on it, it doesn’t just turn up on trees. Dina got that from a young age.”
Blackie knew what top quality looked like because Montell Douglas, British record holder for 100m before Asher-Smith, had come through the same ranks at Blackheath and Bromley athletics club.
One day he asked Douglas if she would take a look at his young protege at Lee Valley. What she saw blew her away.
“Dina couldn’t have been any more than 14 and was running a 300m,” Douglas said. “She was tiny yet she ran a ridiculous time. I looked at her and said, ‘that is insane, a joke, ridiculous for your age’. She just smiled that big smile of hers!
“I knew then she was an extreme talent so when she finally broke my British record and people asked if I was annoyed, I laughed. I’d been expecting it for years.”
The record went again at the Khalifa Stadium on Sunday when Asher-Smith clocked 10.83 seconds to become the first British woman ever to win a world medal at 100m.
It is likely to get even better tomorrow when the Kent star lines up as favourite to win the 200m, having qualified fastest out of the heats and seen almost all her rivals drop out.
Yet Blackie refers to Doha as a “stepping stone” to Tokyo and says he does not expect all that they have been working on to come to fruition until next year.
“I don’t think about her being Olympic champion,” he added. “The fact I think she could be - and I do think she can - is another kettle of fish.”
