With great relief: Charlie Dobson won silver in the 400 meters at the European Championships.

It is only four years since Charlie Dobson ran his first competitive 400 metre race and barely 12 months since he was departing university with a first-class degree in aeronautical engineering. Now he is leaving Rome with a European Championship silver medal and is set for a first Olympic Games in Paris next month where he could yet contend for medals.

On what was a more disappointing night for Britain’s world champion pole vaulter Molly Caudery, who took bronze, Dobson lowered his personal best to 44.38sec to go fifth on the British all-time list and among the 10 fastest in the world this year.

It also took a championship record from Belgium’s Alexander Doom to beat him, with both men inside Iwan Thomas’s 44.52sec mark that was set more than a quarter of a century ago in 1998.

It was Thomas who predicted two years ago that the 24-year-old – a runner he called “the ginger ninja, the 200m boy” – had the potential to become a world beater over the longest of all sprint distances.

Even as late as last year, Dobson himself would need some persuasion since he was still alternating between sporadic 400-meter runs and indoor 60-meter runs. But this Olympic season, he has focused more on the 400 meters, and with three runs under 45 seconds, it appears that a unique ability has been discovered.

With teammate Matthew Hudson-Smith sitting out the race in Rome after setting a European best of 44.07 seconds in Oslo last month, Dobson’s rise also means a significant improvement for Britain’s 4×400-meter Olympic relay squad.

Dobson showed maturity in his pacing to move up from third to second and even briefly pose a danger to the more seasoned Doom on the finishing straight. Dobson’s undergraduate dissertation focused on the finite element analysis of a gas turbine engine.

“I’m over the moon, I couldn’t be happier – I think I executed the race perfectly, exactly how me and my coach wanted to,” said Dobson. “I’ve always had a very kind of engineering mindset towards things. When I first moved to Loughborough I hadn’t dreamed of doing the 400.

“People convinced me to give it a try – I did in 2020, during the Covid year as there were no major championships, and I ran pretty well. Everyone wants to be an Olympian at some point in their lives. I don’t think I realised I could until a couple of years ago.”

Caudery takes pole vault bronze

Already the only Briton to win a world pole vault title, Caudery had earlier been favourite to continue her history-making 2024 by also becoming the first British woman to win a major outdoor title in the event.

The big danger was expected to be Finland’s Wilma Murto but the defending champion unexpectedly went out at 4.58m, leaving the former Olympic champion Katerina Stefanidi and Switzerland’s Angelica Moser to contest the medals with Caudery.