When a bleary-eyed British team gathered at Belgrade’s Nikola Tesla airport on Monday morning after equalling their best result at a European Indoor Championships, Neil Black, the UK Athletics performance director, was asked just how high Laura Muir’s star might soar. His response was short yet striking. “She is a once-in-a-generation athlete.”
Given the 23-year-old Muir’s 1500m and 3,000m gold medals in Belgrade were the first and second of her career, that might sound overly dramatic but the evidence of the past eight months suggests Black was merely stating the obvious.
It is not only that Muir has set five British records and two European records at distances ranging from 1,000m to 5,000m since August. It is the way she has done it. Long solo runs from the front or lung-busting sprint finishes – it does not matter. The result is the same: the living daylights are thrashed out of her opponents as well as the clock.
The next challenge, as Muir says, is coping with the step up in competition and pressure at this summer’s world championships in London. Not that she is concerned – she wants to double up in the 1500m and 5,000m. “You can’t go winning medals and breaking records and not go raising expectations,” she says. “I’ll take it all in my stride.”
The IAAF president, Sebastian Coe, a keen onlooker in Belgrade, believes the European indoor gold will act as a springboard to greater glories for Muir – just like it did for him back in 1977. “This will have boosted her a lot,” he said. “My first championship medal was an 800m indoors 40 years ago in San Sebastián. Mo Farah made his breakthrough indoors, as did Colin Jackson.
“Two years ago Laura wasn’t making the right decisions on the track but she has grown in maturity. Now she feels she is not going to get beaten – and, most importantly, her rivals don’t think so either. It’s a pretty good moment to get into a purple patch with the world championships coming up.”
Coe is also impressed with Muir’s mental toughness after several early career disappointments, most acutely at the world indoors in Sopot and the Commonwealth Games in Glasgow in 2014, where she fell short of the medals many expected from her. There was also frustration at the Rio Olympics in the 1500m final when she tried to go with Genzebe Dibaba on what turned out to be a 57-second third lap and found her medal hopes burned up by lactic acid.
Muir responded to that setback by running 3min 55.22sec a week later – the 16th fastest time in history on a list dominated by former Eastern bloc and Chinese athletes who were around when state-sponsored doping was prevalent – and she has not been beaten since. More impressive still, she has continued to improve while combining running 40-50 miles a week with work placements during a veterinary degree at the University of Glasgow.
Coe said: “I love the way she’s done it. It’s quite tough when you’ve chosen the most difficult sport in the world to master and probably one of the most difficult degree courses at the same time. She’s juggling all the plates – I take my hat off to her.”
A large part of her success is down to genetics which, according to her coach, Andy Young, give her the right blend of slow and fast twitch muscles that make her dangerous at all distances from 800m upwards. “I’ve never seen someone with that sort of capability. I used to train with Paula Radcliffe when I was at Loughborough and she obviously had a huge engine but she didn’t have a turn of speed. Kelly Holmes had that huge turn of speed but not the engine – Laura has both.”
Then there is her physical robustness, which means Muir tolerates and thrives in hard training sessions without her body breaking down, and her work ethic. As Young puts it: “When she arrived she didn’t like going into the red zone, the pain zone. She was always running within herself. But over the last couple of years we’ve developed that and she now gives it everything.”
Some at British Athletics remain to be convinced Muir should double up at London. Young insists the world championships schedule is perfect as it involves running her favourite event, the 1500m, on the first, second and fourth days, and then a two-day break before the 5,000m heats. “She wants to start racking up the medals,” said Young. “She wants world championship medals, she wants Olympic medals.”
It will not be easy. In the 1500m she will face the world-record holder Dibaba, who seems back at her best after a mixed 2016 during which the Ethiopian’s coach, Jama Aden, was arrested by Spanish police on suspicion of doping after EPO was found in the hotel they and others were staying in. In the 5,000m another Ethiopian, Almaz Ayana, will be a danger.
In the current climate all athletes who set fast times are automatically under suspicion, along with their coaches. Young stresses that Muir is powered by little more than a good diet and the odd chocolate recovery shake. “Laura also takes iron because she struggled with that, and sometimes magnesium, but she doesn’t like taking tablets,” he said. “When she first started she wouldn’t even take paracetamol or ibuprofen when the legs got sore or for a headache. It’s not her way. And it’s not my way either.”
