“If you want to win it, you’ve got to take it from me,” Matthew Hudson-Smith had warned his 400m rivals on the eve of Paris. And yards from glory, one did.
For the second night in a row in the Stade de France, a British athlete reached out for gold and had it ripped away by a charging American, Quincy Hall following in Cole Hocker’s footsteps, down the home straight, across the line and halfway round the top bend to ring that victory bell.
Hudson-Smith, the favourite in the form of his life, ran just about as well as those confident and in-the-know had billed, a time of 43.44 seconds taking another hefty chunk out of his own European record, and carrying him into the world’s top five of all-time. Hall, though, was four-hundredths quicker, with Muzala Samukonga of Zambia in third.
Having won bronze and then silver at successive World Championships, the fastest man on the planet in 2024 had made clear that only gold here would do. An expletive hurled into the Parisian night at the line, and the tears shed in hugs with family in the crowd, suggested that view is unchanged.
That it meant and mattered so much, though, is a triumph of sorts in itself. Three years ago, Hudson-Smith was ready to give all this up, not just his Olympic dream but life itself. Covid lockdown in America, the injuries, the medical bills, they had all become too much, and he attempted suicide in his desperation for a way out. There are incredible comebacks at every turn at these Games, but it takes nothing away from those to note this among the most extreme.
But then the Birchfield Harrier’s career has never stalked any predictable trajectory, never lived in the common phases of promise, potential, peak and decline.
After the supposed breakthrough of a first major title, European gold in 2018, he did not dip below 45 seconds again for almost four years. After running 44.75sec as a teenager in 2014, how much faster had a decade of graft, a third-of-a-life of toil, made him before tonight? One single second - and half of that only coming since May. That is the level of dedication it takes just to toe the start line. It is a tale of rapid, sudden progress, and a tale of anything but.
He was bidding to become the first British man in a century, since Eric Liddell at the Paris Games of 1924, to win this title. So long ago was that victory, and so primitive was athletics’ state, that some still considered the 400m to be a middle-distance event. Liddell’s winning time of 47.6seconds, a world record at that point, probably will not make the hurdles podium on Friday night.
In his quest to bring the story full circle with one perfect lap, Hudson-Smith came with a plan. He shut down almost comically early in Tuesday’s semi-final, learning from defeat in Budapest last summer. Then, he had set a new European record in qualifying for the final, but run five-hundredths-of-a-second slower in the big one itself. Hardly a glaring misjudgment, hey, except the same tiny shift in the other direction would have been good enough for gold.
Far from over-racing, though, he blamed a lack of it, a disrupted season meaning his body wasn’t used to giving its full output under the stresses of fatigue. Since, he and coach Gary Evans have made preparing for the same scenario a pillar of their regime. There are 6am gym workouts now, before his sessions hit the track. It is hard and often he runs tired. But why train fresh, when you know the race of your life will also be your third of the week?
So here it was. Just as in the World final 12 months ago, Hudson-Smith led off the bend and halfway from there to the line. At that stage in Hungary, he had gone searching for a kick that was missing, but here his stride held, into new territory, still heading for the top step of the podium as the most others went backwards, the trough running dry.
But then it happened, almost without warning, a flash of red and blue closing best from an unlikely position with unfathomable surviving speed. Just as 24 hours earlier, Josh Kerr had sensed something ominously quick and American coming up his inside.
