Rhasidat Adeleke has been competing at the University of Texas for two years. She has been at the beck and call of their racing demands since her first race of the year on 21 January: 35 races, 20 of them over 400 metres.
That’s an enormously demanding season.
Context is everything, as they say, so there is the key context for last night's fourth place finish for Adeleke.
So she was operating off relative fumes of fuel left in the tank for last night's 400m final in Budapest.
However the decision to turn professional last month means she can now formulate her own schedule from here on, because she no longer runs on a roster for the University of Texas.
In essence, Rhasidat’s peak for this season was the American Collegiate (NCAA) final ten weeks ago, where she was the shock winner in 49.20 seconds - almost a full second quicker than she ran last night.
That’s about eight metres difference in terms of track. With that time, if she could have been as fresh as she was in June, she would have won silver last night. She know’s that, she actually referenced that exact fact last night.
For further context, to win the NCAA championships is huge. Her own winning time was faster than last year’s European Championships gold medal performance.
She only turns 21 on Tuesday. She’s only one place off the medal rostrum here despite being clearly well off her peak for the season, so with a fresh schedule geared towards purely peaking for the Olympics next year, she’s on course to challenge more seriously for a medal in Paris.
Other athletes around her then will come into the equation, others around her will similarly improve, and there’s no guarantee that she will line up against even half the field that competed last night.
But she’s poised to be an Olympic medal contender..no question about that..
Sarah Lavin is one of the great stories of Irish athletics. She is similar in age to Ciara Mageean - a couple of years younger at 29 - and she has had a similar career of ups and downs. And she’s a late bloomer.
She only broke 13 seconds for the 100 hurdles two years ago at 27, but yesterday finally broke Derval O’Rourke’s Irish record.
She finishes with a ranking of 10th in the world here after reaching the European final and World Indoor final last year.
Last night she was about one metre of track away from making the final and she had a big lump on her knee from hitting the ninth hurdle.
She needs to improve to make the final of the Olympics next year but she’s an improving athlete
That’s the key.
She, like Mageean, broke Irish records here and that upward trajectory element is key to her Olympic ambitions.
