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Keely Hodgkinson crossed the line and for the first time all night didn’t know what to do. She looked up at the board, just to check, then she glanced up again, just to make sure. What she saw made her features wobble: at last, Hodgkinson had won gold, and Great Britain’s latest athletics star had her crowning moment at the Olympics.
Hodgkinson came to Paris with the intent of upgrading the silver she claimed in Tokyo three years ago, of ending the cycle of second-place finishes at major competitions. As she won a stunning 800m gold with a smart race and a gutsy, determined finish at the Stade de France, the 22-year-old delivered, the talent becoming a champion.
And then Hodgkinson set off on a lap of pure joy, holding the British flag with her right arm and pumping the air with her fist. Somewhere she found a crown that matched the symbolic significance: in following Kelly Holmes to win 800m gold at the Olympics, 20 years on from Athens, she also secured Great Britain’s first gold medal on the track since Mo Farah’s double in 2016.
“It hasn’t sunk in yet,” she said. “But I’ve worked so hard for this - and I am out of words of what to say.”
Hodgkinson had been in control from start to end; calm and present from the moment she was announced last on track, sprinting past her block on the middle lane and taking her time on the walk back to her position. Over the course of the opening lap, she surged to the front with clinical precision, head still as her arms pumped and legs whirred underneath.
She would not let go. To her right, the world champion Mary Moraa clung onto her shoulder for as long as she could. But when Hodgkinson reached the final bend and realised the moment she had so desperately waited for was just ahead and ready to claim, she simply took off and showed her class, winning in 1:56:72.
Moraa was third in 1:57:42, with Kenya’s Tsige Duguma in second in 1:57:15. Hodgkinson was almost two seconds down on her personal best, set in London last month. With this first major title secured, she is only going to get better.
At the last Olympics, her world flipped overnight. It will do so once again. “It changed my life last time and I think being the champion, no one can ever take that away from me,” she said. “This is the biggest stage our sports ever on. I don’t know what it’ll bring, but I think I’m a lot better prepared for it than I was last time.”
Three years ago, at 19, she won an unexpected silver in Tokyo, breaking Kelly Holmes’s British record. Everything she knew from before that medal changed: leaving university to go full-time with her sport, moving out of home to live on her own, forced into the limelight as the great next hope before she had the chance to understand how momentous an Olympic silver was.
No wonder there was a comedown, a reckoning that this was the bar and it had been set so high. Because when a young athlete captures that first success, the expectation is so often to repeat it, better it; as if a career is a line on a graph that only ever goes up. The thing about Hodgkinson, though, is that it is exactly what she has always done even when two world championships in a row left her with the heartbreak of silver.
Even after becoming a star of British athletics, as Nike, Louis Vuitton and a range of other sponsors lined up to throw money at her feet, she remained dedicated to her simple craft. If winning world championship silver behind Athing Mu in 2022, then silver again behind Moraa in 2023 looks like standing in the same place, stuck in second, then what we underestimate is how intensely the desire within started to burn to make the next step.
The near misses could have defined her. Instead, ahead of Paris, Hodgkinson wouldn’t consider the thought of another. When she walked off the track in Budapest after the world championships last August, she made a vow to herself that she would not come second at a major event again. A repeat of the silver that meant so much three years ago would no longer be a prize, but a symbol of what had been lost.
This was about winning gold, even winning well. Hodgkinson was the favourite. Before the Olympics, she lowered the British record and her personal best with a 1:54:61 at the London Diamond League in July, running the sixth-fastest 800m of all time. The reigning champion Mu was missing after falling at the US Olympics trials, denying the Olympics of a great rivalry. No one else in the final had run sub 1:56:00, although Moraa was on the cusp when winning the world championship title.
Being the favourite brought pressure and expectation. With a chance to win an Olympic title, another near-miss would have been devastating. “I’ve had to try and block out the noise,” she said. “To deliver on this stage, it means everything. But it’s also been very, very difficult. Definitely super tough.”
But this was her race, and her gold. And this time, no one was taking that moment away.
