Britain's Daniel Awde made a superb start to the decathlon with a personal best in the opening event before injury ended his Olympics.

The Woodford Green AC with Essex Ladies athlete responded to the roars of another capacity 80,000 crowd with a storming run of 10.71 secs in the fourth and final heat of the 100m, taking 0.14 off his previous best.

That was good enough to put the 24-year-old in seventh place overall, 85 points behind world-record holder Ashton Eaton, who ran an Olympic decathlon best of 10.35 to lead fellow American Trey Hardee by 17 points.

Awde then found himself under huge pressure in the long jump when his first two jumps were fouls, and was understandably well behind the board with his final attempt.

The resulting distance of 6.83m was well down on his personal best of 7.47m and saw him drop to 19th overall, 379 points behind Eaton, who had jumped 8.03m to extend his lead over Hardee to 143 points.

Unfortunately for Awde, his Olympic experience came to an end as he suffered a knee injury taking that final leap.

The devastated athlete explained: “I’ve had a flare up of patella tendinitis and if I continued it would probably rupture.
 

“It’s been a real rollercoaster, and we try to find solutions to it. It works for about a week, then we find another solution and that works for about a week. If you spoke to me at the start of the year I wouldn’t have expected to be here in the first place, it’s been a real bane of my life for the last two years.”
 

Awde, 21stin Beijing, said a change of events may be on the cards: “Whenever I jump it destroys it. If I run I’m fine, when I take off it destroys it.
 

“I thought about changing events, I thought about what I might do after I competed at the Games depending on what intervention we get to clear it up. Whether next year is going to be written off I don’t know. I have a lot of people saying I should dabble into the 400 metres or the 400-metre hurdles – we’ll see. I’m going to speak to my coach and doctors to see what can be done.
 

“My passion is for decathlon. It is what I love doing and what I came into the sport to do, and if I can’t do that I don’t know.
 

“I’m in the best shape of my life. I was so ready for this to put on a good show, entertain the crowd. I was ready but my knee wasn’t. Without being too arrogant, if the pain is enough to make me stop and pull out of my home Olympics then it’s too painful,” he added.