Wayde van Niekerk's golden run from 2015 to 2017 was offset by the worst luck imaginable after his knee injury. Having scraped into the final of the 400m at the World Champs, he is due some luck.
There were signs in the 400m World Championship semi-finals that Wayde van Niekerk may no longer be the athlete who could be relied on to kick devastatingly in the final straight anymore.
Whether that is as a result of age or the lingering effects of his serious knee injury in 2017 is a case of the truth being somewhere in the middle, but on Tuesday he didn't look like an athlete with a miraculous extra gear in reserve like he used to six years ago. Van Niekerk, who had enjoyed using Great Britain's Matthew Hudson-Smith as a measure of where he should be in his heat because he could see him for the entirety of the race, resorted to his 2016 tactics and the body seemed to remind him he was seven years older as he finished in third place and in a time of 44.65sec in third place - outside automatic qualification.
"So over the next couple of days I need to get my head right and prove to myself that this is what I want, and then we put our best foot forward in the final.” But Jamaica's Watson - coached by Usain Bolt's old coach, Glen Mills, and the fastest in the field with the 44.13sec lifetime best he posted in the semis - is looking to add to his World Youth and Under-18 titles at the ripe old age of 21.
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