In one of many closing articles on the Tokyo 2025, Stuart Weir expresses his consternation on the shortage of medals from Crew GB relay groups within the twentieth World Championships. Stuart Weir is the RBR Senior Author for Europe, and coated the Tokyo occasion remotely. We missed Stuart in Tokyo 2025, and look ahead to seeing him within the Commonwealth Video games and European Open air in 2026.
Relay disappointments
Relays are vital to Crew GB. UKA targets them. UKA pours cash into them. This yr UK Athletics by means of the Nationwide Lottery cash for sport funded 23 British athletes particularly for relays – along with these funded for particular person occasions. On the Paris Olympics group GB medaled in all 5 relays – 4 bronze and a silver. In Tokyo not a single relay medal. On the 2023 Worlds GB gained three medals and in 2022 two medals. However how do you go from 5 medals in Paris to zero a yr later? That may be a query that the Federation wants to deal with and shortly. The administration of the relay program must be held to account.
My query: ‘how do you go from 5 medals in Paris to zero a yr later’ doesn’t even do justice to the what occurred in Tokyo. The ladies’s 4X400 which took bronze in Paris completed eighth as in final within the prelim. How can than have occurred? The boys’s 4 by 100 failed to complete within the prelim, messing up the ultimate baton change. In fact that may occur to anybody underneath stress however in a prelim with all of the occasions they’ve practiced? The Blended group was fifth and the boys’s 4X400 sixth – neither near a medal. The ladies’s 4 by 100 had been fourth – however in Paris they had been second and only one hesitant change-over from gold.
Among the athlete feedback bothered me. Dina Asher-Smith’s remark “There’s by no means going to be disappointment as a result of these women are completely improbable and all of us completely gave it our all”, troubled me. I do know that Dina at all times speaks very circumspectly and unemotionally however I might have preferred her to have expressed disenchanted that they’d didn’t the anticipated medal!
I used to be stunned to listen to a British athlete, funded for relay, complain after the person occasion that their efficiency had been hindered by having to run the blended relay. However certainly that’s what they’re funded for and was additionally the higher medal alternative. Bemused once more.
You’ll be able to ask questions like what would have occurred if the Males’s 4X400 had had a completely match Matt Hudson-Smith? You’ll be able to say that the ladies’s 4X400 group lacked 2 of the quartet that had run a nationwide file in Paris. It could have been stronger within the closing with Amber Anning however the 4 who ran had been certainly adequate to get a high 3 qualifying place.
To fail to attain even one medal. Solely to get three groups within the closing was, for me, past disappointing. GB in all probability places extra money into relays than another nation. The place did all of it go fallacious?
