Team GB's youngest athlete Phoebe Gill, 17, on taking inspiration from Emma Raducanu and Kelly Holmes as the 800m prodigy lines up with Keely Hodgkinson at the Paris Olympics

It was as elementary, she says, as her primary school PE teacher seeing her ‘running around a field’ as a seven-year-old and entering her into a school cross country race, which she promptly won. But no-one anticipated that spontaneous piece of talent-spotting yielding the outcome it has, inside ten years.

That runner, Phoebe Gill, is now 17, and about to become the youngest British track and field Olympian since 16-year-old Linsey MacDonald qualified for the 1980 Games in Moscow. She is Team GB’s youngest athlete and only when she sits down to reflect on recent weeks, and what lies ahead, does the sudden collision of her two worlds become vividly clear.

A week or so after sitting lower sixth exams in in biology, chemistry and maths, in April, she smashed a record that has stood for 45 years - running faster than any European under-18 girl in an 800m race, in Belfast.

A day after storming to victory at the UK Championships, last month, to secure her spot on the GB team here and maintain the British women’s 800m Olympic pedigree set by Kelly Holmes and Keely Hodgkinson, she was back in a maths class. A week’s work experience placement at a local primary school promptly ensued.

Gill, who turned 17 in April, is being propelled into the spotlight so fast that it’s hard not to flinch. She asserts that she has ‘definitely’ taken some inspiration from Emma Raducanu, also a sixth form student when she won the US Open, though the tennis player’s subsequent trajectory demonstrates how painfully few certainties there are in sport.

Reassuring to hear, then, of the message Gill has received from an athlete who has travelled the same path, wanting to find words for one of her own. When Gill had flown home from Belfast, she received an Instagram voicemail from Kelly Holmes, 800m and 1500m gold medal at the 2004 Athens Games.

‘When she sent me [that] message I was screaming in the bathroom!’ Gill relates. ‘I was in shock - on the verge of tears playing it. I sent one back and I’ve met her in person now. It’s crazy to be meeting all my idols that I’ve been watching on the TV for so long.’

Holmes advice? ‘Just, “well done.” Just to “let whatever happens, happen.” It was really good advice. I didn’t want to put too much stress on myself at the time and to have someone like Kelly Holmes giving advice to me was amazing. It confirmed I had achieved this amazing thing and I was so happy with it.’

Gill certainly has perspective. A clear sense of where she wants to be, with university on her horizon, come what may in Paris, she insists. By the time she had finished primary school, she decided that cross-country was not for her, though she had finished third in the nationals for her age group. ‘I realised I hated cross country and preferred middle distance,’ she says. Her coach at the St Albans club, Deborah Steer, who has been with her since that time, helped develop her affinity with the 800m and 1500m.

That Belfast run, where Gill completed two laps of the track in 1min 57.86secs, was the game-changer – coming at a time when the sheer weight of effort, combining study and sport, was beginning to weigh heavy. ‘I remember crying on the plane back because going sub-two had been such a dream of mine for so long. To think I did that in that race after a stressful lead up to it. Since I ran 1:57, I’ve felt older in a way and started to compare myself to more mature athletes. It was an indescribable feeling.’

Hodgkinson’s devastating run to silver in Tokyo as a 19-year-old, three years ago, had an impact on the 14-year-old Gill. ‘I stayed up until two in the morning to watch it,’ she says.

There have been no direct messages from Hodgkinson, now 22 and a rival in the 800m event which starts next Friday, but words from her in the media from which Gill says she has taken encouragement. ‘It’s nice, because she was quite young going into her first Games,’ Gill says. ‘Going in as the underdog, you feel less pressure and no one is really watching you.’

Britain’s latest teenage 800m prodigy says her mind is clear. ‘For me the aim is just to progress through as many rounds as possible and to have fun and run with freedom,’ she reflects. ‘I know that’s when I start to excel, when I’m not too stressed out by the environment around me.

‘I can’t wait to run with this amazing crowd of people. Hopefully it will produce some fast times but let’s see what happens.’ Those words Holmes spoke - ‘let whatever happens, happen’ – have resonated.