Head tilted back to the elements, the recently established British record holder revelled in the rain as he stood in his soaked Shaftesbury Barnet Harriers vest of vertical white and black stripes, catching the downpour with widespread hands.

It made him look as if he was flying - which was apt, given that Hughes has a private pilot’s licence.

The 27-year-old Anguillan-born sprinter, who ran 9.83sec at last month’s New York Grand Prix to take 0.04 seconds off the record Linford Christie set in winning the 1993 world title, became a training partner of Usain Bolt’s in 2012 after winning a scholarship aged 16 to join the High Performance Training Centre in Kingston, Jamaica.

Bolt, the multiple world and Olympic sprinting champion who retired in 2017 and whose world 100 and 200m records of 9.59 and 19.19 stand from the 2009 World Championships, now refers to his erstwhile track partner as "The Captain".

Speaking to BBC Radio 5 Live, Hughes explained that his passion for aviation began at the age of 11.

"I remember my first time being inside a cockpit with a pilot in Anguilla, I was just so excited," he said. "I remember asking the pilot can I touch, and he was like, 'Do not touch anything'."

The fascination persisted, however, and when he made the move to Jamaica he also secured scholarship to start flight school - but was unable to do so as his mother was unable to sign the consent form.

His ambitions, however, remained sky high - just as they were ahead of his New York City run when he noted in his diary earlier that day that he was going to run 9.83.

"When I turned 21, I went back there [to flight school] and I started to pay my way through," he added. "Now, I’m a private pilot."

Hughes added that he now hopes to move to gain a commercial licence too so he can continue working - at the highest level - after an athletics career that has already brought him European titles at 100 and 200m, world 4x100m silver and bronze and - until the positive test produced by team-mate CJ Ujah - Olympic 4x100 silver.

But the accomplishments of this season have provided some mitigation of that huge disappointment and he will head for next month’s World Athletics Championships in Budapest as British champion over 100m and 200m.

The latter victory in Manchester took place yesterday in blustery rather than rainy conditions which caused his time of 19.77 - well inside John Regis’s 1994 British record of 19.87 set in the thin air of Sestriere - to be inadmissible for record purposes due to a following wind of 2.3 metres per second, just 0.3mps over the limit.

Hughes’s high-flying double life is unusual, but not unique.

Twenty five years ago another British athlete took a similar route after his soaring career had become grounded - 400m runner David Grindley.

At the age of 19 this product of Wigan became the latest British one-lap runner to be very good, very young.

Roger Black was just 20 when he won the Commonwealth and European titles in 1986. Fifteen years earlier, David Jenkins had won the European Championships from the outside lane at the age of 19.

At the 1992 Olympics in Barcelona, Grindley arrived as the third choice in the event behind Black and Derek Redmond and returned as a finalist and national record holder.

Redmond, poignantly and historically, finished the first semi-final supported by his father after his hamstring had gone on the back straight.

Grindley’s record of 44.47 came in the second semi-final as he claimed the fourth and final qualifying place ahead of Black, who clocked 44.72, and went on to finish sixth in a final won by Quincy Watts of the United States in an Olympic record of 43.50.

Arriving is one thing. Staying is another. Black, who had missed the 1988 Olympics through illness, would lose another couple of years to injuries before returning to take an Olympic silver medal at Atlanta 1996. 

For Redmond, whose British record Grindley had broken, Barcelona was effectively the end of a career punctuated by so many operations on his Achilles tendons that he once jokingly suggested to the surgeon that he fit a zip in.

Grindley, who also picked up an Olympic bronze in the 4x400m relay, remained at high altitude in 1993, being ranked world number one and winning the Grand Prix Final at Crystal Palace in imperious fashion. But by the time that year’s World Championships came around in Stuttgart, the young contender from Wigan was not there.

Despite racing sparingly throughout the season, the first of what would proved to be overwhelming Achilles tendon problems had arrived…

As he struggled physically, and mentally, to maintain a career of outstanding promise, Grindley widened - or rather raised - his ambitions and earned a qualification as a commercial pilot.

In 1999, three years after his track career had finally been given its last rites, he became a fully fledged airline pilot for Flybe before switching in 2003 to TUI, for whom he has worked for more than 20 years.

A career to which, for the moment, Hughes can only aspire…