British athletes reconvened at their Parisian holding camp today in preparation for the Olympics, which get under way this Friday.
A total of 64 track and field athletes are due to compete at the Games — and predominantly with a clean bill of health, following the final warm-up event for Paris 2024, the Diamond League in London at the weekend.
While many of the team’s star turns opted to stay away from the event, the likes of Matt Hudson-Smith, Keely Hodgkinson, Dina Asher-Smith and Katarina Johnson-Thompson all opted to compete in the capital one last time.
One question mark remains over Johnson-Thompson, who recorded a best of 6.54metres in the long jump on Saturday in front of a 60,000-strong crowd, the exact same distance she managed in winning a second world title in Budapest last summer. She pulled out midway through the European Championships earlier this summer and had a series of injections in her Achilles in the aftermath, but said the problem seemed “to have settled down now”.
Her recent form is promising. She ran her best 200m since 2019 at the Olympic trials and managed a season’s best in the shot put at a meet in Loughborough recently.
However, the rigours of seven events in the heptathlon are a different matter, but she said: “I think I’m in good shape. All the signs are there that I’m coming into shape. That’s all I can ask for.
“I’m just praying I can take that into the heptathlon. I was really happy with being able to get into the 6.50s [in the long jump] straight away, because it was an event I hadn’t done since Budapest.
“Tendinitis is an ongoing thing. I think a lot of people struggle with it. It comes and goes, it gets bad and good again, so it’s something I have to keep an eye on, but it’s something I’ve got on top of now. But you cannot predict a heptathlon.”
Question marks will remain about Johnson-Thompson’s ability to go for multi-event gold, in contrast to Hodgkinson and Hudson-Smith, who have marked themselves as golden favourites in the 800m and 400m respectively.
In the capital, Hodgkinson broke her British record and set a world-leading time of 1min 54.61sec to win the 800m from Jemma Reekie and Georgia Bell, who both set personal bests in taking second and third respectively.
Hudson-Smith dramatically lowered his 400m European record to 43.74sec — and later insisted he had held back in the dying stages of that race.
Hodgkinson was already looking to Jarmila Kratochvilova’s 41-year-old world record of 1:53.28. The Briton said: “We’re getting closer. Do I think it’s beatable? Now, I would say ‘yes’. It would take a very special race.
“Hopefully, I will have a long time to try. I’m feeling really good and confident ahead of Paris.”
Hudson-Smith headed to Paris making his new rapid time for one lap of the track seem like little more than a box-ticking exercise.
“That’s exactly what me and my team were aiming for, to get the world lead in time for Paris,” he said. “I wrote 43.70 on a piece of paper before I left. I knew at 370m I had it in the bag, so I eased down. I’ve got plenty more. It’s a long time coming and I’m actually healthy.”
