‘Keep reeling in medals!’ Hodgkinson inspired by Farah and Ennis

The Olympic women’s 800m Final is shaping up to be one of, if not the most competitive, dramatic, emotional races of Paris 2024.

Why? Because the runners involved that could contest gold, silver and bronze have been tussling in races with one another since the last Olympics and Team GB’s Keely Hodgkinson is in the mix, along with the USA’s Athing Mu and Kenya’s Mary Moraa.

Don’t rule out another Brit in Jemma Reekie, who came fourth in the Tokyo Final.

Hodgkinson though has stardust to sprinkle over two laps of the track. As a 19-year at the Tokyo Games in 2021 she took silver – what a way to announce herself to the World.

She keeps lowering her personal best and currently stands at 10th fastest on the all-time list at 1 minute 55.19 seconds.

Now 22, she’s fast and way more experienced. Where Tokyo was a blur where her adrenalin went stratospheric after her silver and she barely slept for days, now she views 800m as a job. One she is very good at.

Key to her success are her coaches. A husband and wife team who treat Keely as if she were one of their own. Trevor Painter and Jenny Meadows, who herself was a seriously good 800m runner taking bronze at the World Championships in 2009, push Hodgkinson to and beyond the pain barrier, but then make the hard training days fun.

Hodgkinson told Sky Sports: “I just really gelled with Jenny and Trevor when I first met them when I was like 15, so I knew them way before I joined their setup.

“And I just think, like Trevor’s probably said before, his focus is ‘a happy athlete is a fast athlete’, so I just try and create that environment. But I think we have a really good relationship in that he knows when he’s annoying me and he knows when I’m not in the mood for his dad jokes!”

Watching them training in Manchester, you see and hear the relationship. It is ‘back and forth’ with humour, but there’s an instant switch when the serious hard work has to be done: “Looking at Mo Farah and Jess Ennis, it’s like ‘how do they do it every year over and over again?’ And I look back now and think ‘oh you have done it now for a good couple of years’, but it’s just keeping that going and I think it’s the one thing I’d like to do, to just keep reeling in the medals.”

And ‘reeling in the medals’ is what she has done. At European level so far it’s been gold. Add to that two World Championship silver medals and the silver from the Tokyo Olympics: “So far I’ve medalled at every championships I’ve ever been to which is quite hard to do… unfortunately I’ve been second every time!”

The next step is to get ahead of an American and a Kenyan: “I’ll probably say it’s in the mind, really. I think there’s a big difference between racing for a medal and racing for a gold medal, because if you watch back loads of races where people have gone for gold, they’ve ended up 4th, 5th, 6th because they’ve messed it up.

“So now I’m at a point where I’m like ‘right, well how do we get that gold?’ I think every year I’ve got closer and I’m in better shape as the seasons gone, so hopefully that all comes together in a few weeks and I’ll be better than I was before – so that’s a great position to be going into Paris.

“But I do actually think it’s all in the mind – the tiny split seconds that you make you really just need to believe and run a bit fearless, because if you don’t risk it you won’t get the rewards.”

Coaches Painter and Meadows know they have a special athlete and have invested lots of time – so much so that the first word from their now three-year-old daughter Arabella was something that sounded very much like “Keely or eeely!”

As Meadows put it: “She is prepared to hurt herself. It takes bravery to start a session knowing you’re going to end up like that (on the floor). It’s a real killer event.”

‘A killer event’ is not a bad way to describe the 800m – at the highest level, the athletes on the start line effectively sprint two laps of a track! Hodgkinson intends not to be fazed: “When people think about the day of an Olympic final it can be very stressful. You know ‘oh god, I’ve worked this entire year for two minutes to get it right’

“But I think one of my pros is I look forward to it so much that I don’t even think about getting it wrong. So I’ll sit down and say to myself ‘well, I’ve raced these girls a million times’, and I almost don’t think about it being this big Olympic final.

“It’s just two laps of a track that I’ve done many, many times.”

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