“I'm very well known for just running and not thinking about it much,” Jemma Reekie confesses with admirable honesty.
Splits and stopwatches, not the oats for her porridge. The 23-year-old, the athletics geek who has turned her fascination into a still-unfolding career, simply lives to run.
Past master of the 800 metres, Jenny Meadows, has gone so far as to claim the Olympic medal pretender’s gift is an ability to disengage brain. An odd but justifiable analysis, the Scot laughs.
“Most of the British team call me a sloth because I'm so relaxed. I think that's what she meant and a lot of the team know that's what I'm like. I think she meant it as a compliment. I am quite a sloth.” She giggles anxiously for a moment. “Just don't put a picture of me next to a sloth.”
Certainly not a snail. Stewarton’s superstar in the making is a serial winner with a habit of coming good when it counts. Not on her bow at the world championships two years ago in Doha when she exited in the first round but she has found ways to excel at each step prior.
Weekends in her childhood lapping up winter cross-country like others devour ice cream and Irn Bru, Reekie flourished further when she transplanted herself to Glasgow and hooked up with the training group of her coach Andy Young. Laura Muir was the beacon but Reekie speedily illuminated herself.
“Certainly within a couple of years, she was showing an awful lot of the promise and potential,” says Muir, whose withdrawal from the 800m to focus exclusively on the 1500m appears to have both positive and negative consequences for her colleague, who will be among the first Britons in action when the athletics competition belatedly commences in Tokyo tonight.
Big and little sister of the adoptive kind, Reekie has advanced more speedily for the wisdom inherited close to home. “I have learnt so much from Laura and I know I have her support and can ask her questions,” she says. Young has kept her on an invisible leash to ensure the lassie who took European golds at Under-20 and Under-23 level did not ignite early but then flame out.
The best advice she had received was to deny her instincts and be patient whatever may. “Just trust the process,” she relates. “It's an easy one to say but you just have to trust what you're doing. You always have hard times in athletics, but you just trust the process and it always works out. It makes sense.”
British traditions in the 800 metres date gloriously back to the Games’ previous stop here in Tokyo. Ann Packer pitched up in Japan with only a handful of previous outings over this distance but, to her shock, departed with gold. “Jemma Reekie's extraordinary isn't she?” the past champion, now 79 years young, declares. “ So is Laura Muir Yeah. So I do look out for them.”
As does Kelly Holmes, golden at Athens 2004 and whose online clips Reekie has studied to death. “I've definitely chatted to her over the past year and when I came into the senior rankings and ran fast,” she reveals. “It's been really nice to have her support."
Reekie will have stern competition. Save for the American teen Athing Wu, who leads the 2021 rankings but who has been largely squirreled away, she has confronted most of her challengers and let them cower. Perhaps the foe who she should most fear is the closest to home. Keely Hodgkinson, just 19, but already a European indoor champion, denied both Young’s tyros victory at the British trials with a seasoned and speedy showing that bodes immensely well.
A re-match, come Tuesday’s final, would be an appetising watch. “I definitely think in the short term and long term, the battles Jemma are going to have are really going to push each other on and the sport on,” Wigan’s young warrior insists. “It's just going to be a case of someone does something and someone else does that thing.”
Alex Bell, subbed in for Muir, will plan to progress too. “All the British girls should be aiming to reach the podium, Alex, Keely and myself,” Reekie proclaims. “We are all up there and we could all do it.” Not a time to think, but just run. It is, she adds, “about who can do it on the day.”
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