Richard Kilty suffered five figure financial hit after European snub

Richard Kilty has revealed he suffered a five-figure financial hit in the wake of his farcical omission from the British team at the European Indoor Championships – but believes he will seal a golden hat-trick in Glasgow on Saturday after his shock reprieve.

The two-time European 60m gold medallist was initially left out of the team on February 17 after failing to meet the disproportionately high qualifying mark set by British Athletics. 

However, in a move that rather undermined the home governing body, Glasgow 2019 organisers European Athletics took the unusual step three days later of issuing the 2014 world indoor champion a special invitation.

Richard Kilty has revealed he suffered a five-figure financial hit in the wake of his omission

While that has made the 29-year-old’s performance on Saturday the most fascinating sub-plot of the championships, the earlier snub cost him a significant sponsor.

He said: ‘I don’t want to legally get into it but it was a big financial contract. They wanted me and my wife (Dovile Dzindzaletaite, the Lithuanian triple jumper) to be part of Glasgow 2019 but I got an email saying they didn’t want to work with me anymore and that I wasn’t doing enough social media – which I was. That’s cost me a couple of grand a month.’ 

Kilty, with a season’s best of 6.63sec, will start as jointly the sixth fastest man in the field based on 2019 times, which makes something of a mockery of his original failure to even make the team. 

The British Athletics qualifying mark of 6.60sec would have been good enough for a medal in 2017, while the women’s qualifying standard, for instance, would not have earned a place in their final.

That disparity and the ensuing selection chaos has drawn criticism to British Athletics, and Kilty has admitted it could be ‘very awkward’ if he now goes on to win his third straight title.

He believes he will seal a golden hat-trick in Glasgow on Saturday after his shock reprieve

He said: ‘I always like to visualise my race and imagine myself winning. I don’t know what my emotions will be if I win. Again it would be very awkward if I was to win but it is not something I am thinking of now. It would just be amazing to win after all this and I believe I can.’ 

He added: ‘After not being selected I was really upset to be honest. I took that worse than not being picked for the Olympics in 2012. It was weird, I was stuck in the house all day and my wife was away competing, and she was messaging me saying to do some training. I thought I was going to have a week or two off, have a few big nights out, let my hair down a bit and maybe go on a five or six-day holiday and regroup for outdoors.

‘Instead I went and killed myself in training Monday and Tuesday in the hope something might happen. Then I woke up on the Wednesday to six or seven missed calls and the phone ringing. I had a call (from Neil Black, the British Athletics performance director) to say I had been invited by European Athletics. I was just ecstatic.’ 

On the morning session of day one on Friday, Katarina Johnson-Thompson was in excellent form in the opening rounds of the pentathlon. After sitting second overall with an 8.27sec season’s best in the 60m hurdles, she cleared an impressive 1.96m in the high jump. A personal best throw of 13.15m in her weaker discipline of the shot put her close to a world-record trajectory ahead of the evening session.

The two-time European 60m gold medallist was initially left out of the team on February 17