Matt Hudson-Smith finds excitement in the future after race for the ages
You could use a thousand words to describe one of the greatest 400 metre races of all time and never quite do it justice.
Matthew Hudson-Smith needed only eight to sum up perfectly what it all meant to him.
“Sometimes the journey is better than the outcome,” he said.
Just three summers ago, Hudson-Smith was a man who could see no future. On Wednesday night, deep in the bowels in the Stade de France, no more than half-an-hour after missing out on Olympic gold by 0.04 seconds, it was all he could talk about.
“This is just the start,” he declared. “I know my time will come.”
Frustration? That was there too, simmering under the surface. When you come that close to becoming Olympic champion, you are entitled to be a little hacked off about it.
No-one has ever run a 400m race faster than Hudson-Smith did on Wednesday and not won it. He needed only one word to sum up what that meant and shouted it loudly into the Paris night sky after crossing the line. It cannot be reprinted here.
Soon after there were tears, as Hudson-Smith went to meet his family in the crowd. The sight of his mother, Cheryl, wiping them away with a tissue will remain one of the most iconic images of these Games.
“I didn’t even know they were here,” Hudson-Smith later explained of that moment. “It was a bit of a shock.
