Jodie Williams: Moneylegs is back with Glasgow silver

English sprinter Jodie Williams won her first senior medal in the women's 200m in Glasgow, ending three years of injury torment for an athlete who was nicknamed 'Moneylegs' as a junior and touted as a global supertar after winning 151 consecutive races.

She and compatriot Bianca Williams, no relation, came home second and third behind the majestic Blessing Okagbare of Nigeria, who completed an impressive Commonwealth sprint double at a wet Hampden Park.

Another English runner, Anyika Onuora, was fourth, with the three Jamaican runners relegated to fifth, sixth and eighth in the field.

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

All three of the English women ran personal bests in a race that may have been dominated by the Nigerian but could "mark a watershed moment for women's sprinting" in Britain, according to the Daily Mail.

Jodie Williams (above, right), 20, has been touted as the next big thing in women's athletics since her days as a junior. In 2011 British coach Charles van Commenee even described her as "the sort of athlete every country is waiting for".

After dominating as a junior, she was expected to announce herself on the world stage at the London Olympics. But 2012 did not go as planned and after a series of niggling injuries she pulled up lame during the British Olympic trials and missed the rest of the season.

Williams was given tickets to the Olympics but found watching her team-mates so upsetting that she had to leave the stadium.

She spent 2013 on the comeback trail but failed to make the 200m final at the World Championships as her "slow rate of recovery made her doubt whether she would ever make podiums again," says Athletics Weekly.

There were fears that Williams might go the way of other talented youngsters and fail to make the grade as a senior. Before the Games, the BBC said that for Williams the "Commonwealths represent a second coming of age as much as first opportunity".

She told the BBC: "Once you've had a hit like that, it's hard to get it back. You know your body is fit and well, but you don't know whether you'll be able to run those times you could before the injury. It's one thing your body being fit and another getting that mental confidence back."