No British athlete has left a world championships with three medals clanking from their neck. But Dina Asher-Smith’s form is so ominous that the bookies give her a better than 50/50 shot of writing a new chapter in track and field history. They are running scared. Her opponents could be forgiven for feeling the same way.

After all, Asher-Smith is this year’s Diamond League winner over 100m, the clear favourite for gold over 200m, and the vital cog in Britain’s 4x100m women’s relay team who won silver in London two years ago. For most people in the sport it is not a question of whether she will win a medal in Doha, but how many and of which colour.

That is an enormous weight for Asher-Smith to bear on her 23-year-old shoulders, especially given that – Katarina Johnson-Thompson and Laura Muir apart – the British team do not possess a deep well of individual medal talent at these championships.

Asher-Smith insists that she has been planning to go global since 2017 – and is now ready to deliver. “My coach John Blackie has been putting me through my paces for a very long time to prepare for this,” she said.

“When we came off London 2017 and went into training for 2018, that was when we made the decision that I was going to double up and that is the time period you need to build up the strength to be able to put together six elite standard sprint races in a championships. We have been preparing for a very, very long time. It has been painful. John has been testing me. When he tells me: ‘You are doing this today,” I am like: ‘What?’

“But we have been preparing and that is why the decision to double up isn’t one that I have taken lightly, it’s not a flippant decision.”

The European championships last year in Berlin proved the perfect dress rehearsal as Asher-Smith beat her British records in running 10.85sec to win the 100m and 21.89 to take the 200m before winning her third gold in leading the relay team to victory with a stunning anchor leg. This time she knows it will be tougher, especially in the 100m where she faces the formidable Jamaican Olympic champions Shelly-Ann Fraser-Pryce and Elaine Thompson, who have both run 10.73 this season. The word from the Jamaican camp is that both are in fantastic shape for Doha, which could put gold out of reach for Asher-Smith in that event.

However in the 200m she is clearly the women to beat, especially with the Bahaman Shaunae Miller-Uibo, who has not lost a race since 2017, deciding to only run the 400m because of scheduling issues.

While Asher-Smith knows a podium place in the 100m or 200m would make her the first British woman since Kathy Smallwood-Cook in 1983 to win a global sprint medal, she insists she is not feeling the pressure. “Weirdly enough I don’t and I think that is because I tune out of social media. We have been very clear, John and I, about what my aims are for this season. And we don’t really publicly disclose that until afterwards and that is done deliberately to control expectation.

“There definitely is a little bit of expectation but it is something that is nice and something that is refreshing as a British female sprinter – we expect you to do X, Y and Z.”

However as she prepares for her first race, in the 100m heats on Saturday, Asher-Smith knows she is facing a moment of truth. “The world championships is going to be the first time where we see everybody with nowhere to hide this year. There’s no ‘I wasn’t ready for this, I wasn’t ready for this’, because if you are not ready for the world championships, when are you ready?”