Williamson the champion sprinter Britain left behind
Pete Nichols wonders why there is no place at the world championships for one of our best athletes
Wednesday August 22, 2007
The Guardian
Simeon Williamson is the best young sprinter in Britain but instead of having breakfast in bed like the rest of the British team in Macau this week the 21-year-old is looking slightly lost at the Lee Valley Athletics Centre in north London.
Williamson is having his hamstring checked by his physiotherapist. It caused him problems last summer but has been OK this.
The diagnosis is that he is in good shape. Which makes the fact that he is kicking his heels here while others of lesser pedigree are representing Britain in Japan all the more frustrating.
“I think that’s it for the season now,” he says. “I’ll take a month out for an active holiday, cycling probably, and I want to go to Rome.”
In Debrecen last month Williamson represented Britain at the European Under-23 Championships. In the final he and his team-mate Craig Pickering had the race to themselves. Pickering has made headlines all year but in Hungary he was second best.
“I was really expecting Craig to beat me but he couldn’t go past, not this time. I was excited, not because I couldn’t believe I’d won but I couldn’t believe the time,” Williamson says.
He had clocked 10.10sec - 0.04sec behind Marlon Devonish’s best British mark of the season.
Williamson’s place in the world championship team could have been settled two weeks later at the trials but he missed them with a chest infection.
From the trials Devonish and Pickering were chosen, with the third place left open. Williamson then opted to race in the Universiade - the world student games - in Bangkok rather than the grand prix at Crystal Palace the following Friday.
Nobody, he says, told him that he had to run at Crystal Palace to have a chance of selection.
By the time he had his first race it was already too late to make the team, the selectors having chosen Mark Lewis-Francis after he ran 10.31sec at Crystal Palace.
Williamson, meanwhile, went on to win the Universiade title in belting rain in 10.22sec. He was the only British winner in 18 sports of the Universiade.
The selectors could have kept the place open until the August 13 deadline set by the International Association of Athletic Federations and put Williamson on the plane to Macau, which is less than three hours’ flying time from Bangkok. “That was what I had hoped they might do,” says Williamson.
But there was something all too predictable about Lewis-Francis’ selection. In the same way that Pickering has been held up as the future of British sprinting, so Lewis-Francis has been heralded as a man reborn. It seemed like presentation above performance.
Even the relay was ruled out for Williamson. “Michael Khmel [Britain’s sprint relay coach] says I don’t have any baton skills and, I don’t know what it is, but I’m not very quick in a rolling start,” he admits. But the first leg does not have a rolling start and baton skills are halved. Alex Nelson was drafted in this week because of injury. Williamson is four metres quicker.
Williamson prefers not to dwell on the past. “Next year I want Dwain’s [Chambers] under-23 record of 9.97sec and a place in the Europeans and the world indoors,” he says. “I don’t think as far ahead as London. That’s in the back of my head.”
This may be the weakest team Britain has ever sent to a world championships, made weaker still because a 10.10sec sprinter is languishing in Enfield.