Keely Hodgkinson will celebrate her Olympic 800m gold medal with a holiday before targeting a time that will take her close to the 41-year-old world record. That is the message from Hodgkinson’s coaches, Trevor Painter and Jenny Meadows, the husband and wife team who meticulously prepared the 22-year-old for glory in Paris.
They accept Jarmila Kratochvilova’s time of 1min 53.28sec is out of reach for now but believe Hodgkinson has the talent and desire to break it one day. “She’s going to Marbella on a family holiday,” said Painter. “She says she’s going there to switch off. Then we’ll do the Diamond League final and have a crack there with a pacemaker.
“She knows she can run 1.53. The world record is low 1.53, so it might take a few years before we get to that.”
Painter, whose 800m athletes do a lot of 200m and 400m repetitions in training, said: “We run numbers. We are very data driven. If you do this in training, it correlates to this.
“Keely can deliver it. Some people can’t and it translates into nerves and pressure. The London Diamond League [on 20 July] was the same. She was saying I can definitely run 1.54.”
The highly regarded and popular coaches run the M11 Track Club in Manchester, named after the postcode of Sportcity, with a growing team of athletes including Team GB’s 1500m runner Georgia Bell. It does not hurt that Meadows was a brilliant 800m athlete, who would have surely won more than three world championship medals – one silver and two bronzes – had she not competed in an era of Russian doping.
Painter said they met Hodgkinson for lunch before the race to talk tactics. “The British Olympic Association has got a lodge 15 minutes from the village so she’s been getting a lift across there to eat because it’s a good bit better than the village. She’s not eaten a meal in the village.”
Meadows added: “She was really confident. I spoke to her about a few scenarios that could happen. I said people might start fast and slow the pace. She was just having none of it. ‘No, that’s not going to happen.’ It was being negative from me but I was just making her think about it.”
During the race, the coaches had very different emotions. “I am always quite calm, calmer than Jen,” said Painter. “I just have belief.”
Meadows said: “I was not calm. I wasn’t calm because it was slow. I didn’t want to face the wrath of Keely if she only, I say only, got the silver again. I thought she was making it harder than it needed to be.”
Painter mentioned that Hodgkinson is often late for training. “We have a saying that 15 minutes is OK. Sometimes it’s 20 to 25 minutes and she just strolls in smiling. I’m not too bothered about it because Keely is a free spirit.
“If we contain her, put her in a box and tell her you’ve got to conform to this and want you to be like that, she’ll not be the same person. That kind of free-spirited nature makes her who she is.”
Painter also praised Hodgkinson’s parents, Dean and Rachel, who watched the race with 100 family and friends. “They’ve all got the same T-shirt,” he said. “Dean had them made and designed them.
“Her parents are brilliant hard workers. Her dad has always told her she can do anything. She has great values and she deserves everything she gets because it’s been a tough 12 months with injuries.”
