Meet Britain's fastest woman

History is not always achieved through perfection.
Not everyone who becomes the first, the best or
the greatest does so with a faultless performance.
But then it is the history-makers who tell us this
and they are the sort who are never satisfied.
On a late Sunday afternoon in the Netherlands,
Dina Asher-Smith felt like she always does on a
start line. "I love to race," she says. "I'm not an
adrenaline junkie but I like feeling nervous. I like
the thrill. A lot of the coaches laugh at me and tell
me I'm crazy."
Having finished her first-year exams at King's
College London six days earlier, the world junior
sprint champion felt free.
And as she knelt on the track to prepare for the
starter's gun, her coach's words were still
reverberating in her ears. John Blackie had used
his favourite phrase. "Don't hold the horses," he
told his pupil, before sending her into battle.
The 19-year-old had no expectations of that
summery May day in Hengelo. She isn't one for
predictions. All the European indoor 60m silver
medallist wanted to do was eradicate some of the
inconsistencies which had been bothering her in
training.
"I wanted to make sure I didn't tighten up, didn't
panic, and went through some technical points
successfully," says the athlete who only took
sprinting seriously after winning world relay
bronze in 2013.
Bang. The Briton catapults out of the blocks. But,
as she rises, she is not at ease. "The start wasn't
good, I popped out of my drive. I was thinking
'this is a mess'," she remembers.
The Londoner covers 20m, eats up another 30m,
but by the time she is halfway down the track
European 100m and 200m champion Dafne
Schippers is preparing to overtake and Asher-
Smith is annoyed: "I was thinking 'this isn't how I
wanted it to go'. From that point on, I was just
trying to tidy it up."
The benefit of being a sprinter is that by the time
they wish a race over, it usually is. "I saw the line
coming and I really wasn't happy," says the
usually sanguine student.
Fortunately for the history undergraduate, her
team-mate CJ Ujah - the man who last year, on
the same track, became the fifth Briton to break the
10-second barrier - was waiting near the finish
line.
"If he hadn't been there I probably would have left
the track," says the Briton. "It wasn't awful, it
wasn't abysmal, but it wasn't the race plan I
intended to run and I was quite sad.