Photograph: Martin Rickett/PA
Keely Hodgkinson has warned her opponents that the world indoors is not enough as she sets her sights on four major championship medals in 2022. The 20-year-old is a big James Bond fan and celebrated winning Olympic silver in Tokyo by attending the premier of No Time To Die and being invited by Aston Martin to drive the DB5 car used in the film.
And, having trained hard over the winter, Hodgkinson says she is ready to kick on again by winning her first global gold medal at the world indoors in Belgrade this weekend. But she also believes she can follow it up with medals this summer at the world outdoors in Eugene, Oregon, the Commonwealth Games in Birmingham and, potentially, the European championships in Munich.
“I’d love four major medals,” she says. “It’s definitely physically possible to do all four. Mentally, we’ll see. The world outdoors is No 1 and I really want to do the Commonwealths, as it is a home Games. With the Europeans we’ll see how the body and mind are coping. But I’d like to be there.”
Last year, Hodgkinson announced herself to the world by taking the European indoor title and then running a British outdoor record of 1min 55.88sec to win Olympic silver. To keep her focus fresh for 2022, she wrote down a long list of targets. The first was to break the British indoor 800m record, which she did by running 1:57.20 in Birmingham last month – the fastest time by a woman indoors for 20 years. The next was to win the world indoors. But that, she says, only hints at the scale of her ambition.
“I did write down ‘world champion’, so that is an expectation for me,” she says. “Hopefully, I can go back and tick it off when I get home. I’ve set some goals but they’re pretty big – they are bigger than last year.”
Some items on her bucket list have already been ticked off, including driving Bond’s Aston Martin. “They let me drive it on the roads of Milton Keynes,” she says. “It was the car that was used in the James Bond film, the DB5. There’s 25 worldwide and only one of them is road safe and that’s the one they used in the film.
“I must have said something in an interview because Aston Martin got in touch on Twitter and said they would make it happen. It was very cool – and I went to the world premiere of the film as well.”
Britain field a largely developmental team in Belgrade, but other potential medallists include Elliot Giles in the men’s 800m, the returning Katarina Johnson-Thompson in the women’s heptathlon, Lorraine Ugen in the women’s long jump and Daryll Neita in the women’s 60m.
Twelve Olympic gold medallists from Tokyo are competing, including Shaunae Miller-Uibo in the 400m, the pole vault world record-holder, Mondo Duplantis, and the 100m Olympic champion, Marcell Jacobs, who takes on the world champion, Christian Coleman, over 60m in the race of the weekend.
