British sprinter talks about his perfect indoor season in 2025, preparing to defend his world 60m title, fatherhood and looking to mix things up on the track this summer.
A glance at Jeremiah Azu’s last indoor season suggests he enjoyed the perfect winter. Four championships – Welsh, British, European and world – yielded four 60m gold medals. He was never once beaten, not even in the preliminaries. Perhaps most remarkably, he improved his times through every round at all four championships: the same formula of opening up steadily in the heats, stepping up a gear in the semi-finals and going all out to top the podium in the final.
It is only the gaps in his racing calendar that hint at just how impressively unlikely those career breakthrough few months in early 2025 were – the absence of a single race outside of those four competitions.
Azu had, in fact, been within days of pulling out of the British Championships – a sliding doors moment that would have ended his indoor season when it had barely even begun. International meets were confirmed and flights booked for a whirlwind tour of the European circuit, only for a minor injury to cause him to withdraw and try his luck in Birmingham with minimal preparation.
Then, just two days after the British triumph that almost never happened, his first child Azaire was born, ruling him out of any further races in the build-up to the Europeans, causing a sudden and significant lack of sleep, halting his efforts to properly rehabilitate his body. It was, therefore, all a bit of a bumpy ride. Not that his medal collection gives any indication.
“The combination of becoming a dad and the setbacks I was facing, all those things combined helped me just leave it all on the track,” he says. “Honestly, I think I was running on adrenaline the whole time. I definitely think it’s a physiological response. In that moment, when you have a child, everything is so heightened. You’re so alert. I think that contributed to my performance success.”
One of the beautiful things about athletics is the full array of characters the sport attracts – one startline can feature the showmen, the poker-faced, the deadly focused and the demure. Then there is Azu, the son of a preacher, who might sometimes smile and other times shout, but always exudes unwavering self-belief.
“At the forefront of my mind I’m just being myself,” says the 24-year-old. “I think it’s really important for people to be themselves in those environments. I’m so blessed with this talent that I get to use it to entertain and inspire people. In those moments you have to just tap into yourself because that’s how you get the best out of yourself.
“I’m quite a chatty, charismatic person. I’m confident. How you see me on the track is how I am behind closed doors. It’s a privilege to be in those situations so I just try to enjoy it as much as I can. It was instilled in me from before I even knew it – I’ve been hearing the word of God and the positivity that comes from it. That shows through my life.”
Azu’s confidence that he can successfully defend his 60m crown at next month’s World Indoor Championships is not without foundation. In addition to the mid-winter niggle and Azaire’s arrival, Azu’s 2025 medal rush also came amid the upheaval of relocating to a different country.
Having been based with Marco Airale in Italy for two years – a period that saw him break 10 seconds over 100m for the first time and make his Olympic debut – he decided to return to his hometown of Cardiff and rejoin his previous coach Helen James, who had originally lured him from football to athletics when he was 16.
“Starting a family was the biggest factor,” explains Azu. “It wouldn’t have been too easy travelling back and forth between Italy and the UK with a child. So I decided to put my family first. I think it helps me have a better balance. You can call athletics a job, but becoming someone’s father is forever. It’s bigger than anything. I had to put that first.
“Because of all those things, last year’s indoors wasn’t really on the radar. If I was able to achieve everything I did with how little I trained, that’s why I feel so confident in myself going into 2026. My training last year was so up and down with all the life changes, getting a house, becoming a father. There was so much more I prioritised off the track. This winter I’ve been able to really focus on training.”
Short in stature and powerful out of the blocks, Azu possesses what might be deemed the ideal physique for a 60m sprinter. But he does not want to be pigeon-holed over the shorter distance, nor do performances suggest he should be.
His identical 6.49 winning time at both last year’s European and World Indoor Championships put him into elite company as one of only five British sprinters to have run below 6.50 for 60m and 10 for 100m.
It was why he was disappointed to exit last summer’s World Championships 100m at the semi-final stage, where he clocked 10.05. “All things considered, to even get there was a massive positive,” he says. “But I don’t like to look at things with perspective – my goal was to make the final and I didn’t make it.”
This summer presents the dual targets of a home Commonwealth Games and European Championships, the first of which offers the rare opportunity to wear the red vest of his home nation. Should they qualify, the aim is for a quartet of sprinters from James’ training group – which also includes the likes of Sam Gordon, Josh Brown and Azu’s younger brother Alex – to compete as the Wales 4x100m team.
“I can’t wait to run for Wales,” he says. “It’s a completely different vibe. It’s a family and it’s a community, especially because a lot of us train out of the same facility in Cardiff. Hearing the Welsh national anthem, I think I’d struggle to stay composed. We hear the British national anthem so much in sport, but to hear the Welsh national anthem from an athletics point of view would be massive.”
With a view to doubling up over 100m and 200m at the Los Angeles 2028 Olympics, Azu also intends on testing himself more over the longer sprint distance this summer, having rarely contested 200m as a senior athlete.
“One of the things I think was a positive for me was coming to athletics quite late because I didn’t really understand what I was doing,” he explains. “I was just racing. I think that helped because once you start to over-complicate it, you can see a lot of people are so great throughout the year but when they come to the championships they struggle.
“But one of the drawbacks is the amount of running years that other people have compared to me, so I need to get those 200s in. I need to get that distance under my belt.”
Before that is the defence of his world 60m crown – a burden that Azu takes seriously as one of the spearheads of the British team this winter.
“There’s that Spiderman quote: ‘With great power comes great responsibility,’” he says. “People are expecting things now. I’m always someone that’s going to back myself. I know I’ve put the work in, but I’ve also been given this talent by God. I can stand on the startline with confidence that he’s put me in this position. When I’m being myself like that, that combination is quite dangerous. The indoors this year has the potential to be a big spectacle.”
Last winter, he says, “the hardest part was leaving” his partner and newborn at home to head around the world to race. Having now followed his father to half a dozen different countries in his first year of life, Azaire will be in the stands wherever Azu competes this year.
It is all part of a more settled family life – because if last year’s indoor season was a happy accident, now Azu wants to show what he can do without distractions.
