Steve Solomon ran the best first race of season of his life last year. He thought, “Hello, Olympic year, this could be good.” Two days later he couldn’t walk. Given he’s a runner, not being able to walk is not ideal.

For 20 weeks he couldn’t even jog. He had torn the very top of his hamstring where the tendon joins with his bum and his seat bone.

It is the hamstring injury - a tendinopathy - for which there is no quick fix. You can’t have surgery on the tear, you can’t have calf’s blood injections or wolf’s nipple chips (get them while they’re hot, they’re lovely), you just have to wait and sit it out.

For most of us that is called winter, but for Solomon, that was agony. He couldn’t swim, as that would aggravate it. He couldn’t ride, as grinding away on the seat was a worse pain in the bum than, well, grinding away on a bike seat. He couldn’t do anything but wait.

While he sat and walked slowly and waited, he had the Tokyo Olympics looming, and expectation was that he would be arriving ready to run a single lap of an athletics track really fast. Ordinarily this is something Solomon does quite well. He has been to five world championships, two Olympics - he made the final as a 19-year-old kid at the London Games - and at the last Commonwealth Games on the Gold Coast he made the final.

So as Tokyo neared, he worried if he’d be right. He wasn’t, but got himself there and willed himself to a personal best in the heat and finished third in the semis but was cruelly only the first two finishers went through and he was cut. Ruthless.

For a year, he tried to get himself right. He went to the world championships and nothing worked, ran slowly and was run out in the heat. He was not far off but in a sport of small margins it was enough.

He arrived in Birmingham and within two weeks he pulled it together. What had been struggling to connect in the US now clicked.