Middle-distance runner secures Britain’s third gold medal in the space of half an hour in Toruń with the second fastest indoor time in history.
The question wasn’t so much whether Keely Hodgkinson would win the women’s 800m at the World Indoor Championships on Sunday (March 22) but by how much?
It always feels a little premature to hang a gold medal around an athlete’s neck before they have competed, but the 24-year-old is in such a rich vein of form it was hard to see any other result.
As expected, she controlled the pace from the front, too, passing 200m in 27.26, 400m in 56.95 and 600m in 86.46 before coming home in 1:55.30 – a time that has only been beaten once indoors in history, by Hodgkinson herself when she set the world record of 1:54.87 in Liévin one month earlier.
Everyone else was running for second place, with Audrey Werro emerging as the best of the rest with a Swiss record of 1:56.64 as Addison Wiley of the United States took bronze with a PB of 1:58.36.
”I wanted to let loose, and make everyone work, work hard,” said Hodgkinson on her 800m win. “And who knows, maybe on another day, without two races in my legs, I would have had the world record again.”
Instead she took down Ludmila Formanova’s championship record and has now collected a grand slam of major medals – Olympics, Commonwealth Games, plus world and Europeans, indoors and out.
Impressively, less than an hour later Hodgkinson returned to run a 50.1 relay split on the anchor leg of the 4x400m final, although even she couldn’t rescue Britain on that occasion as the team, which included Tess McHugh, Dina Asher-Smith and Louisa Stoney, finished fifth behind the United States, Netherlands, Spain and Poland.
She also spent some of the time between the 800m and 4x400m celebrating with fellow British gold medallists, Georgia Hunter Bell and Molly Caudery.
“There has been a lot going on in the last hour – everything seems a bit blurry to me,” she said. “It feels so, so nice being able to run and win. This is my first world title.
“I have just ran a 50-second split in the relay and I am actually so impressed with myself about that. I really wanted to do it.
“I have an amazing training group. Myself and Georgia work hard and we push each other at every practice – we are both in the shape of our lives. It’s great to have someone who can challenge me in training. I am really grateful for our friendship, our rivalry and our training.”
Next on the agenda is the European Championships in Birmingham and a potential tilt at Jarmila Kratochvilova’s long-standing world outdoor record of 1:53.28 this summer.