World 200m champion returns to indoor racing for the first time since 2018

Britain’s Dina Asher-Smith is set to race indoors for the first time since 2018 when she lines up at the World Athletics Indoor Tour Gold meeting in Karlsruhe, Germany, on January 29.

The world 200m champion raced sparingly in 2020, contesting three low-key ‘DASH Series’ events in Bromley in September over 75m and 150m, as well as another 150m event on her local track in August.

As Asher-Smith explained in a recent exclusive interview with AW (click here to read), she instead spent much of last year priming her mind.

“I used the year in a different way,” she said. “Normally it would have been a very testing time for our bodies. For myself, my team and my coach it’s been about looking at things from a different perspective and not trying to just act like everything’s normal.

“Everything hasn’t been normal and the faster you come to terms with it, the better you can use the time. I made it very clear in 2020 that I wasn’t just going to race for racing’s sake, especially when one of the downsides of racing was that you could potentially catch a life-altering virus.

“We used the time to get stronger in areas that we wouldn’t normally have the time to work on.”

READ MORE | Dina Asher-Smith interview: “If you don’t run fast, nobody cares”

It will be her first international race since October 5, 2019, when she formed part of GB’s world silver medal-winning 4x100m relay team at the World Championships in Doha, having claimed her 200m title three days earlier.

In Karlsruhe Asher-Smith, whose PB is 7.08, is set to race against Poland’s European indoor champion Ewa Swoboda, who won the 2019 event’s 60m race in 7.10 and went close to her 7.07 PB with 7.08 in her heat, plus Switzerland’s Ajla Del Ponte and Germany’s Tatjana Pinto.

Other entries for the Indoor Meeting Karlsruhe, which is the first event in the 2021 World Athletics Indoor Tour Gold series, are Cuba’s Juan Miguel Echevarria in the long jump and Germany’s Gesa Felicitas Krause in the 1500m, plus Britain’s Andrew Pozzi and France’s Dimitri Bascou and Pascal Martinot-Lagarde in the 60m hurdles.

The event is set to take place behind closed doors.

World Athletics Indoor Tour Gold series 2021

Jan 29 – Karlsruhe, Germany
Feb 9 – Lievin, France
Feb 13 –Boston, USA
Feb 17 – Torun, Poland
Feb 24 – Madrid, Spain