Here is a nice article about Craig Pickering. Enjoy.
Pickering is sprinting up the pecking order at lastAug 1 2007
By Sam Munnery
Sammunnery@Trinitysouth.Co.Uk
SPRINTING star Craig Pickering is, by his own admission, a mild mannered, easy going young man But take him on over 100 metres, a Playstation 3 or XBox console, and be prepared for an aggressive contest.
The smart advice would be to avoid racing him over 100m completely.The Crawley-born 20-year-old is the fourth-fastest man in the country this year and one of the brightest young talents in British athletics.
In fact, you might not have much of a chance of beating him on the computer games either - Pickering has two consoles in his student house in Bath so gets plenty of practice.
"I've got a Playstation 3 and an X-Box," he said. "We're a house of four students, so we have house competitions on football games and it really very competitive and real-ly aggressive.
"I'm not an aggressive person at all but for some reason sprinting and computer games bring out the worst in me."
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While Pickering's abilities on the Playstation remain a mystery, what is undeniable is his talent on the track. He already has a silver medal from the European Under 23s earlier this month and continues to rise through the British sprint rankings this season.
Pickering also picked up silver at the European Indoor Championships in Birmingham and then justified his selection for the European Cup in Munich by setting a personal best to win the 100m.
There might have been something in the Crawley water system when he lived in the town, because he has now emerged as an athlete with genuine aspirations to rise to the pinnacle of his sport.
Already he has won gold for Great Britain in the European U20 Championships in 2005, been the British Universities champion for the last two years and captained the GB U23 team at the European Championships in Hungary last month.
At that event in Debrecen, Pickering was pipped to the gold medal by fellow Briton Simeon Williamson, but rather than being disappointed he prefers to focus on the a new personal best time of 10.14secs he set in the race. "I didn't win but I ran 10.14
which is as quick as I've ever run so I couldn't have done any better than that," he says.
"Simeon had to run a massive PB to win that race, and to be honest I was more worried about the French guy (Martial Mbandjock) who ended up finishing third."
But apart from his personal concerns, Pickering also had to fulfil his responsibilities as captain and, having already had experience of a European Championships at U20 level, he was well placed to do it.
"It is nice when you get recognised for your achievements, but I didn't want to get carried away - I was just focussing on my running," he says.
"A lot of the athletes were nervous. But I tried to say to them that it's a good sign because it shows that you are ready and you have to remember that everyone wants you to do well. You do get to control those nerves with experience."
Captaining his country is a long way from the moment Pickering first started to get serious with sprinting.
Having moved from Crawley to Milton Keynes he was later encouraged to join Milton Keynes Athletics Club by his PE teacher after setting a 100m record in his first sports day at Royal Latin School.
Since then he has been national AAA champion at U15, U17 and U23 level as well as U17 champion indoors and has won two English Schools titles.
But it was 2005 when things really started to take off for Pickering.
His time of 10.22 in winning the Loughborough International 100m was the fastest by a junior in the world that year, taking him to fifth on the British all-time list.
With the world already beginning to sit up and take notice, he went on to claim a European U20 gold medal, defeat Olympic gold medallist Darren Campbell in Bedford and earn a call-up to the British 4x100m relay squad for the world championships in Helsinki.
For a 20-year-old to have that CV already would attract a lot of attention in itself but as a white British sprinter, Pickering has had to shoulder an extra weight of scrutiny every time he goes down on the blocks. So how does he deal with it?
"I just focus 100 per cent on what I want to do," he says."I concentrate on getting to the line first and don't think about anything else other than getting down the track as quickly as I can.
"I train with Jason Gardener and he gives me a lot of advice. He is an Olympic champion and former World Youth Champion and so he passes on information to me and helps keep my feet on the ground. If I beat him in a race he tries even harder to beat me in the next one!"
Gardener was put in the shade by Pickering on Saturday as the youngster stormed to second place in the UK Championships and World Trials in Manchester.
In a strong headwind that made times irrelevant, the Crawley-born star finished in 10.32, losing out to Marlon Devonish by just 0.01 of a second but was enough for him to be selected for the GB team going to the World Championships in Osaka, Japan at the end of August.
Pickering says the call-up will complete one of his athletics ambitions."I want to make the World Championships team this year, then hopefully go to the Olympics and the Worlds as many times as possible and just get as many medals as I can.
"I've been racing against the Brits all season so there is nothing new there, but once you're out there you are racing for yourself and yourself only - everyone is, because we all want to be going to Osaka.
"I've continued to improve throughout the season and it has helped to prepare me for the big occasions.
"The reason we race is because we want to win medals and be the best.
"I don't think too much about London 2012 because there are a lot of races between now and then such as World Championships, European Championships and an Olympics (in Beijing in 2008) so I'm concentrating on doing well in those."
Edited by: white lightning 
