Defending champion Keely Hodgkinson cruised through the fastest-ever women’s 800m semi-final in European Athletics Championships history to secure her spot in Wednesday evening’s final.
The two-time world and Tokyo Olympic silver medal winner clocked 1:58.07 to stake her spot as the fastest qualifier on day five of competition in Rome.
Fellow Britons Erin Wallace (1:59.89), who came sixth in Hodgkinson’s heat, and Alexandra Bell (2:00.57) narrowly missed out on the final.
Hodgkinson said: “This is way too early for me and less than 24 hours since the last race. I felt good - I think today I wanted to be a bit more where I was comfortable with on the pace.
“A couple of the girls were saying thank you afterwards because they got PBs.”
The British quartet of Asha Philip, Amy Hunt, Dina Asher-Smith and Desiree Henry comfortably saw themselves through to the women’s 4x100m relay final with 42.25, the best time for a women’s European 4x100m team this year.
With less than 50 days to go until the Olympic Games open in Paris, it was a different story for their male counterparts CJ Ujah, Jona Efoloko, Richard Kilty and Romell Glave, who finished eighth and last in their heat with 39.60 and will miss the final.
Kilty said: “It was horrendous, I don’t know what happened. We should never been running that slow.
“We are going to need to take a look back at it on the video, but that team on paper is a very very fast team, but something clearly went wrong.
“It is very disappointing as we wanted to come here and win. We are capable of winning.
“It is a new team. We have never run that particular order before, we are trying things out for the Olympics, so we have to test people out on different legs before it, which makes sense. But, we are just really disappointed with that, it is all just very much a blur.”
There was better news in the men’s 4x400m relay, where the British team of Lewis Davey, Michael Ohioze, Toby Harries and Charlie Carvell won their heat in 3:01.69 for a chance to defend Great Britain’s 2022 European gold.
