Gabby Thomas celebrates after winning the women’s 200m.  Photograph: Tom Jenkins/The Guardian

Out in front Gabby Thomas was already raising her hands to her head, overcome with the ­realisation that she had just this very moment become the Olympic 200m champion.

A couple of strides behind her, the new 100m champion Julien Alfred was striding smoothly through the line in second place, and there just a little further back still, came Dina Asher‑Smith, Daryll Neita, and the USA’s Brittany Brown, ­shoulder‑to‑shoulder-to-shoulder in lanes 4, 5, and 6, with just the three‑hundredths of a second between them. All three of them were struggling with everything they had for that last extra ­millimetre that would win them the bronze. It was Brown who got it.

So another Games has come and gone for this talented British pair without either winning an indivi­dual medal. Neita finished fourth in the 100m, and was fifth in the 200m, Asher-Smith didn’t make it through the semi-finals of the shorter sprint, and came fourth in the longer one. Asher-Smith is 28, Neita 27, and the truth is neither of them will necessarily have a better chance to win an individual Olympic medal than the one they let get away from them at the Stade de France.

Thomas had been destined to win this race since the Jamaican Shericka Jackson pulled out injured before the heats. Jackson is the second-fastest in history after Florence Griffith Joyner, and the only other woman around capable of turning in the kinds of times in which Thomas has been finishing this season. She won in 21.83sec, a way short of her personal best but only a little slower than her fastest this season.

If Asher-Smith had only been able to do likewise and get that close to the 22.07sec she ran in London just last month, let alone her personal best of 21.88sec, she would have been ­pushing Alfred for that silver medal.

Asher-Smith deserved it, given the career she has had. But in this sport, deserving it doesn’t matter much. She tried to front-run the final. She was fast through the bend, and in first place after 50m, but Thomas accele­rated hard coming into the straight, and as she swept ahead you could see Asher‑Smith start to strain to chase after her. She could see the race was getting away from her. Alfred overtook her with 50m to go, and then, finally, just 10m out from the finish, Brown caught her too.

Dina Asher-Smith tried to front-run the final but could not hold off Thomas.  Photograph: John Walton/PA

“I was told to get out and just keep going,” Asher-Smith said afterwards, “and if you die, you die.” And she did. But she managed a smile, said she was proud of how she had performed, and happy for Alfred, who is her training partner.

She seemed oddly ebullient for someone who had just come fourth in one of the biggest races of her career. “I was really proud to have held my own,” she said.

Neita said similar things. “It has been a fantastic Games for me – a ­double finalist,” she said. Some ­athletes are happy to make finals. Others are happy to win them. It’s the difference between being good and being great.

Which Thomas is. Maybe a little too great, if anything. As well as her Olympic gold medal, the bronze she won in Tokyo three years ago, and her assortment of relay medals, she has a degree from Harvard in neuro­biology, a master’s in epidemiology from the University of Texas and, when she’s not competing, training, talking about black representation, or how to reform her sport, she is volun­teering at a not-for-profit medical facility that offers healthcare to patients who don’t have medical insurance. She is also, as everyone on the circuit knows, just about the friendliest person you could meet.

Which doesn’t mean you’d want to race her. She’s tough enough when she needs to be. You don’t win that many races if you don’t enjoy beating up on the people you’re competing against. After her victory in the semi-final, she tried to clap Asher-Smith on the shoulder in congratulations at qualifying in second place. Asher-Smith, who said later that she “ran angry”, shot a few short words which are maybe best left to the lip-readers, and marched straight past. Thomas’s response was to shoot a mischievous little side-eye grin at the camera that was fixed on the two of them.

The 200m runs is a very dif­ferent discipline to the 100m. It’s not just that it’s twice as long, or that it takes in a bend, it’s that the combination of the two means it demands more of a runner. You can brute force your way to victory in the 100m, charging straight ahead all the way, but the 200m requires more. It mixes power, speed, technique and ­endurance. You need to be tactically on‑point and technically precise, which is why some of the greatest at it have also been some of the most stylish over any distance: Wilma Rudolph, Marie-José Pérec, Frankie Fredericks, Allyson Felix.

Thomas fits right into the lineage. There was a time when you might have said Asher-Smith would do, too.

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