Jeremiah Azu: My Golds In My Words

New York Times

30-03-2025

Even as a European champion, Jeremiah Azu is relatively unknown.
In the pre-event press conference for the World Indoor Championships in Nanjing, China, earlier this month, one reporter asked Azu if he was indeed the 'fastest accountant in the world'. They had confused him with fellow British sprinter Eugene Amo-Dadzie. 'Wrong guy,' Azu responded.
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The 23-year-old arrived in Nanjing in fine form. He retained his British 60m title at the end of February, equalling a personal best of 6.56s and winning with daylight between him and the rest despite the short distance of the race. Azu hit the crashmat at the end of the straight so hard, he bounced off it and fell over.
Two weeks later, he cracked the 6.5s barrier for the first time, adding the European 60m title with a 6.49s in Apeldoorn, the Netherlands. His performance there was a masterclass in navigating through the rounds, going quicker in the semi-finals than in the heats and then delivering a personal best in the final.
He then ran an identical time in the World Championships final, winning by one-tenth of a second, ahead of talented Australian youngster Lachlan Kennedy (who, with an outdoor 60m PB and national record 6.43s from January, had the world-leading time coming into the competition).
It made Azu the first male Briton to be 60m world champion since Richard Kilty in 2014, and he is the fifth athlete this millennium to hold the European and world 60m titles simultaneously — three of the other four are also Brits: Kilty, Dwain Chambers and Jason Gardener, plus Lamont Marcell Jacobs of Italy.
A week after he took the world title, Azu sat down with The Athletic at the Alexander Stadium in Birmingham, as part of a media event for the 2026 European Championships being staged at that venue, which were then 500 days out. It was full-circle for Azu to be back there with European and world titles to his name. In 2022, at the Commonwealth Games, the Welshman raced his first senior international final at that stadium, coming fifth in the 100m.
That a 20-minute conversation stems from two minutes of video — showing every angle of the European and world finals — shows Azu is as passionate and attentive to performance details as he is fast.
This is the story of Jeremiah Azu's gold medals, in his own words.
He has not, as I suggest, had videos of these finals on a loop to revel in glory. Azu has rewatched them, but 'more just to see where I could have gone better'.
He describes that European final as 'probably one of my cleanest races ever, a lot cleaner than World Champs — that one was a bit messy, a lot of head movement'.
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The Worlds were his third Championships in the space of a month, so the mental and physical fatigue of going through the rounds were compounding. 'It's hard to say if I could have gone faster if it was cleaner, but I think we had between 6.45 and 6.47 as times I could have run. It's not a million miles off,' he says.
'My training is very much set up to run faster at the championships. I'm always going to have that bit more in the final. Everyone's got crazy-fast training PBs, but when it actually matters, there's pressure. I kind of enjoy it. Sometimes I think to myself, 'Can you actually handle this?'. I know I can.'
The 'bit more' that Azu references is not just about conditioning, but also the mechanics of finishing. Athletes are measured from the point their torso crosses the finish line, so if form degrades and their dip comes too soon, they can end up with a different colour medal — or none at all.
'That's the difference,' he says, rewatching the World Championship final, pointing out that Kennedy 'might be in front of me' with 10m to go. 'It's hard to tell.'
The man himself 🤩
Jeremiah Azu everybody 👏👏@BritAthleticspic.twitter.com/G78xZ4FFuD
— Team GB (@TeamGB) March 21, 2025
'You can only dip on your last step, any more than that and you slow down,' he explains. 'I'm still upright and then I've gone, one step, and it's taken me through the line. I've always been good at timing my dips, I've never really trained it.'
Composure mattered, as did tactics, which might sound surprising for a race that lasts less than seven seconds. Azu says he comes off 'autopilot' halfway through. 'Once I get out of the drive (phase, which is when the athlete is accelerating to top speed), that's when I become aware. Even if I try and think back, it's just blank, and then I wake up at 30 metres.'
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By then, 'it's just staying tall, making sure my feet are landing underneath me and not panicking'.
He knew that Eloy Benitez, the Puerto Rican inside him in lane five, was likely to DNF. He had been stretching his calf beforehand in the call room and asked Azu to share some Tiger Balm pain reliever, which he did.
'I knew that gap was going to appear, and I knew these two (in the outside lanes to his right) had run super-fast in the first two rounds, so they had nothing left. I was expecting to be by myself. At this point (45m in), I couldn't really see anyone (to my left), because they were all in a line.'
The other two medallists came from lanes two and three, to Azu's left, with 21-year-old Kennedy taking silver and South Africa's Akani Simbine, 31, finally getting an individual global medal, the bronze.
'I just knew not to panic because the line's going to come to me. I don't need to try to get to the line.' Azu says. 'That's what took the win, we're talking about the width of paper.'
Did he have an idea crossing the line how fast he had gone?
'I had a glance at the clock just before I hit the pads, and I saw 6.50 and was like, 'Nah, it's quicker than that'. Obviously, 6.49 and 6.50 are the same thing, but you just want to go under it.
'It's funny, because I was more sure that I'd won this than the Europeans, and the Europeans was a bigger gap (to second place).'
Azu thought he had been run out of the gold medal in that European final by the fast-finishing Henrik Larsson, who was to his right. Larsson finished second, in a Swedish record 6.52s, but was three-tenths back on Azu.
As a smaller sprinter — think Christian Coleman, Nesta Carter or Su Bingtian — Azu's blockwork is naturally superior to his top-end mechanics. He can turn his feet over quicker because shorter limbs move faster. 'My biggest area to improve is my transition phase,' he says, after rewatching both finals.
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'It's getting better, so it's working out how to go from staying on the ground (when accelerating) to coming off the ground,' he explains. This is the middle section of the race — from 30m onwards — when athletes hit top speed before starting to decelerate.
'There's a certain position you need to be in, because you can't just come straight up — you will lose all that momentum,' Azu says. 'It's kind of like an aeroplane take-off. Once I'm in my max speed, it's clockwork. After 40, 50 metres, you can't just go quicker, you've got to maintain.'
The real magic of Azu's races is not the finish but the start. He is talkative to the TV cameras, though not quite to the extent of 2024 Olympic 100m champion Noah Lyles of the United States, because it helps settle nerves.
'If people watched me at training, they'd see the same thing,' Azu explains. 'So why would I come here and do anything different?
'On the line, it just comes to me. I don't like to pre-rehearse stuff. I'm not thinking about what I'm about to do, because you can get caught up in thinking, 'This is a European final/a World final, I've dreamed about this moment'. I'm just not there (mentally) for that moment, until they say 'Set'. Especially with the crowd. You can get overwhelmed if you think about them.'
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He cites the 100m at the London Diamond League last July as an example of the occasion getting to him: 'I was like, 'I need to do this for the fans'. I ran OK, but (with) way too much pressure, and I didn't need that — there's no point adding that. It's stuff you learn from.'
He came seventh out of eight in a stacked field that day, running 10.08 seconds in a race where five athletes went sub-10s and three broke the 9.9 barrier.
Azu's reaction times are phenomenal. At those World Championships, he was the fastest to react of 58 athletes in the heats (0.111 seconds), the second-fastest of 24 in the semis (0.129), and only Kennedy got out the blocks quicker in the final.
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'Before every session, we do three thirties (30m sprints) with reaction,' Azu says. 'So we do train it, unintentionally, because every time I race I'm going to have to react (to the gun). It's a massive part of it.'
He is often the last to rise into the set position before the race begins but one of the best over the first three steps. 'I almost feel like I'm hovering over the floor. It's such a specific movement,' he elaborates.
Azu scrubs through a reverse, slow-motion angle of the European indoors' final as he explains the next part. 'I try to keep my feet as low as possible for the first three steps. After that, it's really just hitting the floor as hard as possible.'
Here he works on being 'aggressive. In the acceleration (phase), you need to be on the ground. If you're not, you are not going fast.' Power can only be generated when the athlete's feet are on the floor, so faster steps are better.
Part of the challenge in Nanjing was the track, which Azu said felt 'very new. So I couldn't start the way I normally do. Normally, my feet are almost touching the floor, but I had to lift, because, in the heats, I started and I got caught up on the track because it's so grippy. So it was slowing me down.'
There is a lazy narrative to weave about a redemption arc after Azu false-started in the 100m heats at the Olympics in Paris last August. It meant he lost the chance to shine individually on that stage, but he quickly put that behind him to lead off the 4x100m relay heats and final. Great Britain finished third, their first men's medal in that event for 24 years.
Azu was one of only 13 British athletes sent to Nanjing (with no relay squads) — a much smaller track-and-field team than the 63 who went to Paris.
This is natural for an indoor World Championship, which coaches see more as a launchpad for the outdoor season than an event to peak for, on the other side of the globe. Consequently, the typical American and Jamaican big hitters were also absent, and Azu seized the opportunity.
Neil Gourley, who won 1,500m silver at the World Indoors, was Team GB captain, and used Azu as a source of inspiration.
'He swore a lot,' Azu jokes. 'He mentioned me in the speech and said, 'I'm sure you woke up on that day (European 60m final) and thought, 'let's do something extraordinary'.'
'To have your teammates believing in you, saying that I'm going to win to the press, it allows you to win and fills you with confidence.'
I tell Azu that I always dislike media folk asking athletes 'What's next?' after they win a medal — let alone two titles — and he laughs, more than prepared to speak about his ambitions to get close to Zharnel Hughes' 100m British record of 9.83 seconds.
Azu left Marco Airale's Italy-based training group last December and went back to Helen James, who coached him in Cardiff during his teenage years.
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'We've still got loads of time to work on stuff,' he says. 'It's even more exciting, because I've run fast in 100m the last couple of years (he became the first Welshman to run a wind-legal sub-10 seconds 100m last May), but my 60m and 200m just didn't improve.
'So to come back (this year) and instantly run a 60m PB, it just shows that we're making the right decisions.'
Azu says the sub 9.9s barrier for 100m is 'where we want to be. There, you're really competitive. I know I'm capable, I want to be in that mix. If you can run 6.5s (for 60m) you can run 9.9s (for 100m),' he adds, explaining sprinting exchange rates.
'If you can run 6.4s, you can run 9.8s. In the summer, my 60m will be better because I'm not trying to get to 60m.'
The target is to be splitting under 6.45s for 60m en route to a fast 100m — that quality of start would put him in medal contention.
'All I want to do is be consistent,' Azu says, believing that, if he consistently breaks 10s this outdoor season, 'I know my one-off is going to be 9.8 and who knows what the one-off of that could be.
'It'll be exciting this summer.'