Blasting out of the starting blocks, Annabelle Richardson conjures up her best Robert Esmie.

Yes, the grade nine sensation at Lo-Ellen Park Secondary School who captured two gold medals and a bronze at the OFSAA Track & Field Championships earlier this month is being tutored by the Olympic gold medal sprinter.

But this runs deeper.

Undersized, even by first year high-school standards and especially when pitted against the very best athletes her age in the province, Richardson requires a far better than average start as well as rapid leg turnover to compensate for a shorter stride length.

While I am by no means a technical guru in the least when it comes to the sprints, this does sound somewhat like the M.O. of the Sudbury native who bolted the first leg of the 4 X 100m relay in Atlanta, giving Canada quite literally the “leg up” it would need to beat the Americans and finish first.

“In the OFSAA (100m) final, I stayed down a good 20 to 30 metres longer than everyone else and you could see me pulling away pretty quickly,” said Richardson, likely having re-watched that memorable race on more than one occasion in the past few weeks.

“I was driving longer than the other girls and that’s a nice advantage to have.”

It’s also an advantage that Richardson and Esmie have worked hard to craft with the young lady whose only real inkling of her inner potential, at a quite young age, would come via soccer. “I knew that I was pretty quick on the field when I got put into positions like midfield or forward,” she said.

If it was pretty much a given that young Nehemiah Esmie was going to run track at some point in his adolescence, that same fate for Richardson would lie in tennis, with both her grandfather (Jim) and her father (Cliff) instrumental in the development of the sport in these parts.

Moving on to a different athletic passion would not be easy.

“I love tennis a lot – but I could really see myself running track,” said Richardson, first competing in grade six at Holy Cross and connecting with Esmie and the Air Blastoff team a year later following the SCDSB year-end meet. “I was good at tennis but definitely not the best.”

“I look at all of the accomplishments I have and I know that I have a higher ranking in track than I ever had in tennis.”

While it seems clear, at the moment, that the 100m/200m tandem are likely to be the go-to events for the well-spoken 14 year old, that was certainly not the starting point in a club setting. “When I started with Rob, I didn’t really know which events I was going to do,” said Richardson. “He put me in a bunch to experiment on where I was.”

“It was pretty clear after a couple of meets that I should stick to the 100m and 200m. That’s when he started giving me more specialized workouts.”

That said, when the long game would be to secure an NCAA scholarship and still be running sprints well into her mid-twenties, Richardson and Esmie both realize that maintaining variety in training, and perhaps, to some extent, even in competition, will be critical to avoiding burnout.

Block starts, for instance, are fun.

“We practice that a lot – and holding our drive,” said Richardson. “It’s really short distances, maybe 10 or 20 metres, which doesn’t really tire us out.”

But there is pleasure to be found also in the pulleys, enjoying that sling-shot sensation down the track. And running the Garson sand pits. Heck, even the non-fun stuff is appreciated when you understand the end goal.

“Rob switches it up at practices all the time,” noted Richardson. “We’ll do conditioning and it’s hard, not my favourite, but it feels good to put in a good workout.”

The results are undeniable.

Yet for as much as day one at the city track championships would see Richardson shave almost three quarters of a second off a novice girls 200m record that Rebecca Johnston had established back in 2004, there remained that uncertainty about racing the truly elite.

“Rob told me I was a medal contender at OFSAA, but part of me didn’t believe him,” said Richardson, who experienced all of the pre-event stress one might expect given the expectations.

“I swear, the entire week before OFSAA, I couldn’t think of anything else.”

It would take all of one heat on that Friday morning in Toronto for Richardson to feel very much in her element, clocking in at 12.53 and earning the top seed entering the final. By Saturday evening, she could proudly boast gold in the 100m, gold in the 4 X 100m (where she came from behind in the final leg to lift Lo-Ellen to victory) and bronze in the 200m.

There will always be goals to be chased.

For as much as running a sub-26 200m sprint was top of mind in early May, that has now been revised to looking to crack the 25-second barrier. For the shorter sprint, it’s all about consistently, clocking in right around 12.50 – or a touch faster – more often than not when she takes to the track.

There will be ebbs and flows in the years to come – that is a given.

For now, Richardson is enjoying the ride while keeping a healthy perspective.

“I don’t think I will ever think that running a short race gets boring,” she said. “It’s so exhilarating – the adrenaline rush is always fun. I don’t think about anything. My mind is clear and I’m just doing what I do.”

And that is something both athlete and coach can relate to.