When in Rome, do not do as the British men’s 4x100 team do.
CJ Ujah and Richard Kilty found themselves reunited for the time since a massive falling out after the former’s doping ban had them stripped of silver at the Tokyo Olympics.
But a quartet also featuring Jona Efoloko and Romell Glave finished last in their European heat, leading Kilty to declare: “It was horrendous.”
Ujah was appearing in his first championships since a 22-month suspension after a drugs test showed two banned substances and he had the team in fifth after running the opening leg.
Efoloko fell back to sixth before Kilty gained ground only for his handover to Glave to go badly wrong as the individual finalist slipped to last in a time of 39.6 sec.
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“I don’t know what happened,” Kilty said. “We should never have been running that slow. We are going to need to take a look back at it on the video.
“That team on paper is a very, very fast team but something clearly went wrong. It is very disappointing as we wanted to come here and win. We are capable of winning.”
How the team gelled was always going to be fascinating considering Kilty previously said he could never forgive Ujah for his “sloppy and reckless” positive test. Ujah said he had not intentionally doped but the banned substances - ostarine and S-23 - came from supplements he had taken that were not batch-approved by Informed Sport.
But with Ujah welcomed back to the fold this week it looked like the hatchet was being buried. It remains unclear whether he will make the squad for Paris and Zharnel Hughes, Jeremiah Azu and Nethaneel Mitchell-Blake were all absent in Rome.
Richard Kilty struggles to hand the baton over to Romell Glave in their relay heat.Yet this British four were still expected to coast into the final - only for it all to go horribly wrong.
Kilty pointed out that “we have never run in that particular order before, we are trying things out for the Olympics” but he could not conceal his disappointment.
“The changeovers weren’t great from the feeling of them,” he added. “We are a team, we are a unit. We win together, we lose together. We go back from this and learn from it.”
The women’s 4x100m team had no such issues as they ran a European lead of 42.25 sec. “That was really good,” Dina Asher-Smith said. “I couldn’t believe it when I saw the time.” She was joined by Asha Philip, Desiree Henry and Amy Hunt, who added: “Maximum speed, minimal stress.”
The opposite was true of their male counterparts.
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