'I took the leap - Carl wished me all the best.I can't thank him enough'

Britain's sprint hope Louie Hinchliffe explains why he left Carl Lewis to be coached by aformer teammate

- Ben Bloom

After a double-session training day on an unseasonably balmy October afternoon in Middlesbrough, Louie Hinchliffe steps outside to leave his new coach, Richard Kilty, rehabilitating a recently mended achilles. It was little over two months ago, seconds after Hinchliffe had handed him Team GB's baton in the Olympic 4x100 metres heats, that Kilty's achilles ruptured.

Somehow, he managed to complete his leg, keeping Britain on track to win bronze in his absence the following evening.

For Kilty, 35, the Olympic medal was a swansong to a career that had included every major international podium. The achilles tear, and subsequent surgery, would confirm his intention to retire from the track. For Hinchliffe, Britain's new great sprint hope, it was a first international medal to follow his maiden national 100m title. Teammates at opposite ends of the career spectrum.

The pair had first met a few weeks earlier when randomly assigned the same room at the London Diamond League. The dynamic sparked, so they chose to replicate the room-sharing arrangement in Paris for the Olympics. Despite the 13-year age gap, and vast difference in life experience, something clicked.

In a British sprinting landscape dominated by southerners, they wondered whether it was because of their outlier northern status - Kilty known as the Teesside Tornado and Hinchliffe hailing from Sheffield.

They revelled in bouncing athletics ideas off one another.

"We just had very similar philosophies," Hinchliffe says.