As booing echoed around the Olympic stadium in London on 5 August, the on-track cameraman circled Justin Gatlin as he bowed at the feet of Usain Bolt. The American had stunned the world by beating Bolt in the Jamaican’s last 100m final, only to be received as a pantomime villain. While commentators reached for new adjectives, in the background of the shot, almost a blur in the whirlwind, a British athlete paced down the outside lane, hands on his hips.
“I was just confused,” Reece Prescod recalls. After a training session in Loughborough, where the 21-year-old sprinter is based when not at home in Walthamstow, north London, he is preparing a mid-afternoon snack of chicken stew with a side of tomato and mozzarella tortellini.
“Normally after a race everyone just claps, but this was weird. It felt like we’d all done something wrong. And then Bolt started his lap of honour so they were still booing, but then cheering at the same time. I didn’t know what was going on.”
Gatlin had held a finger to his lips in an attempt to silence the the crowd, for whom he had had been cast as the former drugs cheat who would dare to rain on Bolt’s farewell parade. Prescod had received his home-crowd cheer when the announcer introduced him on the start line, but then he became a spectator, too.
“I saw it all happen in front of me,” says the sprinter, who ran in lane eight, next to Gatlin in seven. “I saw someone win the world championships right in front of me. In terms of learning and experience, in a way I couldn’t have asked for more.”
Prescod was largely unknown outside athletics. But when he unexpectedly won the national trials in July, he earned automatic qualification to the world championships on his home turf. He talks about it with the confidence of youth, and the composure of a young man trained to “execute his race model”. But two years earlier, Prescod had been working the bar at an Essex golf course and toying with the idea of becoming an estate agent. This was big.
He stormed through qualifying with a 10.03 sec personal best in the heats, and came second in his semi-final, almost beating Jamaican former world champion Yohan Blake. On the start line for the final, he looked as relaxed as Bolt ever did. “You can take one of two approaches at the start,” Prescod says, admitting that his parents and friends were more nervous than him as they watched from the stands. “Either it’s tunnel vision, where you block out everything and everyone. But that kind of focus takes a lot of energy. The opposite is my approach, which is to relax and embrace the situation.”
But the heat and semi had drained any reserves, and Gatlin opened up a big gap right from the gun. Prescod finished seventh of eight runners, in 10.17 sec. Matching his new personal best would only have earned him one more place, but he was nonetheless disappointed after the immediate confusion at the finish. “For about an hour I wasn’t happy, because I don’t like losing. But then, after my competition mode kicked out, it was a case of, ‘You know, I’ve done really well for myself’,” he says.
Prescod was right. Support from Nike and others had already allowed him to train full-time. But making a world championship final elevated him to a new rung of the UK Sport funding ladder, as an athlete with Olympic podium potential. That means more security, and more freedom to train harder and smarter. He’s now working on his start before next summer’s European championships in Glasgow, with a view to maturing as a sprinter in time for the 2020 Olympics in Tokyo.
Perks have followed Prescod off the track, too, where his 6ft 4in frame attracts new attention in supermarket aisles and on red carpets. He won the best newcomer award at the Sports Journalists’ Association sports awards, following in the footsteps of Wayne Rooney and Lewis Hamilton. He gets invited to parties, including the launch of Fifa 18, the computer game. “They gave me it a week before it came out, which was cool,” he says. “Everybody ended up coming round mine to play it.”
Does he ever flick over to YouTube to watch the race of his life, when two retiring giants of the track clashed just as he was arriving on the field? “I’ve got it on my phone, but I don’t know, sometimes it’s good, especially when you’re an elite sportsman, not to dwell on the past, because something else is always coming,” he says, before sitting down to eat. “I can look back at the end of it all. Now, I’m just looking forwards.”
