World Athletics Championships 2019: Dina Asher-Smith, the extraordinary ordinary woman

She may be one of the most exciting athletes in the world with a potential sideline in modelling and TV punditry to fall back on, but Asher-Smith is a painfully – and refreshingly – normal human being

Asher-Smith heads to Doha as one of the poster girls for Team GB (British Athletics via Getty)

Dina Asher-Smith is talking to the press after her win in the 100-metre spring in the Diamond League final in Brussels. She's answering with honest professional sports jargon. She's happy to get through unscathed, mentioning her coach's processes and answering how significant it is to beat a high profile rival. "Yeah, it's cool, but…"

She breaks off her answer to watch Noah Lyles become the first man in history to run sub 19.8 in 200 metres five times in a year. Then goes back to her interview explaining her good fortune at not being injured while holding crossed fingers on both hands.

Asher-Smith is aware she can get distracted. She wrote for Vogue last year, "I always keep my social media notifications turned off, but at this point, I put all of my apps in a folder and rarely check them."

All that focusing has been used well. At the London games of 2012, she carried kits for other athletes, four years later in Rio, she won a bronze for the 4x100m relay. And in 2018 she recorded the equal fastest time in the world, 10.83. She is already the quickest woman in Great Britain over one and two hundred.

These kinds of things have allowed Asher-Smith to become a sporting celebrity. She was on Forbes 30 under 30 list, walked down the runway with Virgil Abloh's Off-White show during Paris Fashion Week, made Sports Illustrated's Fashionable 50 list, has been on the cover of Elle, Stylist and the Harrod's magazine, while appearing in the music video for Santan Dave's "Black".

Asher-Smith will be one of Great Britain's poster girls in Doha (Getty)

Publicly she is modern Britain, but even in her private life, she seems very much like the women of London. And it's no surprise that since her early childhood she has the same friends and running coach. There is a very grounded feel to her.

There are many athletes who when speaking to the press would be so worried about their image and message that the world around them fades away. Asher-Smith was put off by Lyles running - twice. And his race didn't last 20 seconds. She then took to Twitter to alert the world to the moment. Asher-Smith is a refreshingly normal woman who runs very fast.

She started running at Perry Hall primary school in Orpington, before moving on to an athletics club. While Asher-Smith might be of her times, the club she joined is steeped in tradition.

The Blackheath and Bromley Harriers Athletics Club started as the Peckham Hare and Hounds club. The name Harriers is inspired by those original hares. The club formed in 1869 - moving to Blackheath shortly after opening - this year is its 150th anniversary.

Athletics clubs are not like football or rugby clubs, people don't turn up to cheer their local teams as much. They exist because of the members themselves. And this club has produced some special athletes in the past. Their first Olympian was Robert Lindsay. He ran the second leg on the 4x400 gold medal-winning team of the 1920 Antwerp Olympics.

Lindsay like his club, never entirely performed at his best because of World War 1. In the early days of their club, they had a strong tie-up with the Territorial Army, and this meant losing many of their athletes to both World Wars and the Boer war. Yet they kept finding incredible athletes.

It's not as if this club is in some hidden athletic wonderland, it's on the south-eastern outskirts of London, close to the M25. The main track looks like a park with a really lovely walking path as you drive past. You wouldn't think this was a place of greatness, it seems to be just another outer suburban sports facility with a small clubhouse. There would be no reason to pay any attention to it were it not for the athletes it creates. The most notable before Asher-Smith were Adam Gemili and dual Olympian Debbie Marti, the high jumper.

Asher-Smith arrives at the World Championships as one of the favourites for gold (Getty)

Marti was a member of the Bromley Ladies Athletics club first because it wasn't until 1992 that the club started accepting female members. Only three years before Asher-Smith was born.

Before she went to the Harriers as a young girl, a friend of Asher-Smith's promised her ice cream if she came along to a running club. Years later, she had a bet with her mother that if she made a certain time, her mother would buy her an iPhone. Another time it was a handbag. She may be one of the most exciting athletes in the world - with a potential sideline in modelling and TV punditry to fall back on - but Asher-Smith is a painfully normal human being.

Her interviews - and occasional self-penned articles - reveal so many mundane facts that they feel more about the woman who lives around the corner, and not the fastest woman in Europe.

Young successful athletes often have trouble explaining who they are to the world, they see themselves as what they have achieved so far. Their singularity means they can't explain what they do day to day. Asher-Smith is a biographer of her boring moments. Whether it's talking about how her friends have just found out she's started watching Game of Thrones, her retweeting #GBBO memes, tweets concerning hurricane victims in the Bahamas or her love of emoticons and gifs.

She's admitted to getting really emotional when at the London World Championships she realised her childhood friends were in the front row with a poster of her. When asked about wearing makeup when she runs, she's been quite clear in pointing out that if millions of people are watching you want to look your best. She told he Daily Telegraph that sports journalists regularly see her, "sweaty, but with a nice cat-eye".

There’s an alarming honesty about her, so when she talks on an issue, it comes across as sincere. Asher-Smith has talked a lot about the male-dominated media that cover sport, and many of her interviews are to women writers in fashion outlets like Elle, Grazia and Vogue. Her first article for the Telegraph was on why physical education is important to students. She studied history at King's. And she's spoken about the need to keep your self-esteem intact.

For many athletes, Instagram is a branding tool. There are mirror selfies, pics of her with Mary Berry and heaps of photos just of her nails. Athletes rarely embrace this side of themselves, but Asher-Smith loves airing the mundane.

According to her, when at award ceremonies, she slips off her shoes under the table to protect her feet. At once looking after her future performances, but also with the honesty to let people know she's barefooted at fancy dinners.

The last genuine superstar Blackheath and Bromley, produced was Sydney Wooderson.

Wooderson wore Clark Kent glasses when he raced. His body was tiny, standing five foot six and weighed around nine stone. While and his running clothes looked like they'd been passed down from an older brother too early. Wooderson didn't look like what people perceived runners should, but he could run. They called him 'the Mighty Atom'. He held three world records, in the 800metres, 880m and mile. Many thought he'd be the man to break the four-minute mile. Instead, Sir Roger Bannister was inspired to be a miler by watching him.

But Wooderson never won an Olympic medal, he competed only at the 1936 Berlin games, with a broken bone in his ankle and didn't make the 1500m final. The war followed wiping out the next two games. In 1948 when London hosted, Wooderson - who by then was retired - was supposed to bring the flame into the stand, but the then Queen is supposed to have said, "Of course we couldn't have had poor little Sydney".

Wooderson was incredibly famous in his time. There are two books on him, one called 'Sydney Wooderson: A very British hero', and the other called 'Sydney Wooderson; Forgotten hero'. In the latter book, the author David Thurlow writes of Wooderson, "an ordinary chap, a bespectacled solicitor who went to work with his umbrella on the train from South London to the City every day and ran as a hobby."

Wooderson was twice president of the club and was a member until his death in 2006. Dina Asher-Smith joined the club around the same time, Wooderson might as well have passed the baton to her.

Asher-Smith is no Poor Dina, but she's in a field of incredible runners. Elaine Thompson won the gold in the 100m and 200m at Rio Olympics and is only a few years older than her. And the legendary Shelly-Ann Fraser-Pryce won gold in London, gold in Beijing and bronze in Rio and is the equal fastest woman in the world this year.

Asher-Smith will be one of the biggest stars for Team GB (Getty)

It was Fraser-Pryce she was up against in Brussels in her final wrap up for the World Championships.

Fraser-Pryce is small and muscular, there is a power about her that's unleashed once her immaculate technique gets going, beating her seems - at best - improbable. She's a force of nature, more than a sprinter. And since Asher-Smith was a young schoolgirl, Fraser-Pryce has been a champion of sprinting. So when Asher-Smith raced her in Brussels, she wasn't facing another rival, but one of the greatest sprinters of all time.

Asher-Smith leapt out of the blocks, but she knew that Fraser-Pryce would come for her. And at around the 50m mark, Fraser-Pryce pulls about level. Asher-Smith would have seen hundreds of races where someone gets in front of Fraser-Pryce, only to be consumed by her. But Asher-Smith doesn't just hold her own, she pushes away, winning comfortably. It's Fraser-Pryce's pristine stride pattern that looks ragged not the other way around.

This year Asher-Smith has the fourth-best time in the 100m and 200m. There are plenty of people who will say she's an outside chance at gold in either event, but there are more likely winners. But as she told Elle, "I'm one of those people who, when everyone says, 'You can't do that', I'm like, 'Yeah I can'. So my motto would literally be: fuck it."

It's something that Wooderson or Lindsay might have thought but never said. But the club has changed a lot, and so have the people who represent it. This is who Dina Asher-Smith is, the normal modern girl from the ancient club that runs very fast.