Support truly
independent journalism
Zharnel Hughes had no idea what to think when he saw the French police officer approaching.
The world 100m bronze medallist had just landed in Paris for his second Olympics and had barely collected his bags before he noticed the officer watching him with serious intent.
The fastest man in British history steeled himself for what might come next.
“He was asking me for a paper, and I was like, ‘Paper for what? What did I do?’ recalled Hughes, who last summer broke the pair of 30-year-old British 100m and 200m records in a matter of months.
“And he was like, oh! No, no, no no, no problem. Just big fan, big fan.
“I said, ‘big fan?’ and he said, ‘Yes, documentary, Sprint. I’m big fan. I know about you.’
“He just wanted a picture and an autograph. It’s been a lot of people who have been stopping me, ever since Sprint came out.”
Sprint, released by Netflix in early July, is a recent addition into what was already an oversaturated sports documentary market spilling over with stakeholders and sports governing bodies, all hoping their entry will have the same impact as the pioneering and enormously popular Drive to Survive, which drove a wave of new fans to Formula One.
By early accounts, athletics’ submission, also created by the same Box to Box film company responsible for the F1 edition, has managed to find a foothold that others have not.
Speaking in Paris on Thursday, World Athletics president Lord Coe revealed the programme, chronicling sprinters’ journeys to the 2023 world championships in Budapest, was sitting number six across all the viewing on Netflix properties and is currently the number-one Netflix offering in sport.
Anguilla-born British athlete Hughes, who trains in Jamaica with coach Glen Mills, is one of the production’s central figures, his rivalry with (spoiler alert) American 100m and 200m world champion Noah Lyles one of the central storylines.
Both men have something to prove in Paris, where their quest for gold will be filmed for a planned series two.
A knee ligament tear ruled Hughes out of Rio 2016, and the 29-year-old blamed a cramp for the false start that got him disqualified from a Tokyo 2020 100m final nine-time Olympic gold medallist Carl Lewis has since claimed the first Briton to reach one in 21 years would have won.
Lyles flew to that same Games as the world 200m champion and heavy favourite, and after a disappointing bronze opened up about a battle with depression that had followed him to Japan, exacerbated by Covid-19 restrictions that left the showman without an audience.
He will have no such problem at the Stade de France, which was packed with fans on Friday morning for the first heats of these Games.
Speaking earlier this week, Lyles, determined to settle the “fastest man” debate once and for all with a golden double in Paris, said: “If there is no crowd, that is most likely when you will see me lose. The bigger the crowd, the more likely I am to run fast and… when Noah Lyles is being Noah Lyles, no one can beat me.”
Hughes is one of three Britons hoping to prove that rhetoric wrong, beginning with Saturday’s 100m heats.
The sprinter credited his team for why he “wasn’t worried much” about his Paris chances, despite sitting out the European championships and British Olympic trials with a hamstring injury.
He returned to action for the July 20 London Diamond League meet, where he finished sixth in the 100m with a season’s best 10.00 seconds.
Lyles won that race, laying down an Olympic marker with a personal best 9.81 and proving his point in front of a sold-out London Stadium.
The pair will clash in the 100m, 200m and – should the American get his way – the 4x100m relay, the latter three summers after Great Britain were stripped of silver when CJ Ujah failed a doping test.
Hughes is Great Britain’s lone entry at the longer distance, while he’ll be joined in the 100m by rapidly-rising compatriot Louie Hinchliffe, who beat Hughes by three one hundredths of a second in London, and Jeremiah Azu, the first Welsh athlete to run sub-10 seconds for 100m.
Asked if the injury had shifted his perceptions of success in Paris, Hughes’ answer was simple: “No.”
He added: “I’m a lot more confident. I feel my headspace is in a much better place and Tokyo is long gone now.
“I’ve put that behind me, and now I’m just focusing on the task at hand, which is to get through the rounds and deliver.”
