New model Keely is back and better than ever

What Keely Hodgkinson anticipated as a glorified and extended lap of honour has proved to be anything but.

On the eve of the 2025 season, the 23-year-old had allowed herself to imagine being announced as the 800m Olympic champion at her eponymous event, the Keely Klassic, in February. But a hamstring tear denied her the chance to compete and a second three months later left her hopes of making it to the World Athletics Championships in Tokyo hanging by a thread.

Tears were shed and she allowed herself to face up to the reality that she might not even make the plane to Japan. The past month has turned that entirely on its head. “It’s a bit of a miracle in a way that it’s gone so well,” she said. “I never would have thought it would go that well.”

Thursday’s heats of the 800m will barely be a month since making her competitive return for the first time in 376 days since that Olympic title. Back then in Silesia, she ran just
0.13 seconds outside her personal best and the British record, a seemingly impossible time after such a long lay-off.

To get to that point, she tried everything from employing a full-time physio to venting her anger and frustration with a psychologist, and even getting a Himalayan salt lamp the size of her head – a gift from her coach Trevor Painter, which supposedly boosts the mood. Hodgkinson had needed a lift. And just like that, 2025 has gone from a potential nadir to her now being seen once more as a banker for gold for a second successive summer.

She is aware of the expectation from inside and outside the team but brushes it off. “The pressure? You know what, nothing can be worse than last year,” she said. “That was so much pressure that I feel like we’ve kind of gone above that now. I know how to deal with it.”

Her determination to force her way back into contention has not gone noticed in athletics’ upper echelons. World Athletics president Seb Coe called her “mahogany hard” and tipped her to become one of the greatest athletes of all time and not just in Britain.

Another global title from the former bridesmaid of the track with a previous Olympic silver to her name and two runners-up spots at the World Championships would further cement that. So too a shot at Jarmila Kratochvíilová’s world record, a barely plausible 1:53.28 when it was set in 1983.

Hodgkinson’s PB may be more than a second outside that but she said: “I do believe that 1:53 is possible. Whether it comes out or not, I don’t know. It would be great if that was now.”

In the back of the mind, there is always the doubt because of her past physical frailties. The first tear in February was less of a surprise coming off the back of building up her muscle mass in the gym to make her more powerful while not losing her out-and-out speed.

The second was rather more of a shock coming just after an eight-hour round trip in the car to Windsor Castle to pick up her MBE from Prince William.

It led to a tight back and, in turn, the hamstring went in a subsequent training session.

“I would say that second one broke my heart a little bit,” she said. “I was very down after that one. The first one was just bad luck. But getting injured in May so close to the outdoor season was a nightmare.”

Any sense that she has been wrapped up in cotton wool by Painter and his wife Jenny Meadows, herself a former 800m runner, has been dismissed by her track forays to date. A few days after Silesia, she was running fast in Lausanne where she broke the 23-year-old meeting record and has continued to push herself to the limit up to her last hard track session here in Tokyo
on Friday.

The relationship between athlete and coaches is one that Painter likens to her having “another set of parents – she has parents at home and parents at the track”.

Painter’s first memory of Hodgkinson as an athlete was her throwing the shot putt – “terrible” is his honest assessment – while her mother Rachel initially sought out Meadows for some middle-distance running pointers. The rest is history.

Hodgkinson’s great strength, argues Painter, is two-fold: her ability to push herself beyond others in training and her composure under pressure. If he sets the parameters of a training session, she “always goes to the latter end of those bigger numbers”. Which is why it hurt athlete and coach alike when some critics suggested she was doing nothing during her injury lay-off beyond posting on TikTok.

“I like to not use injury time as wasted time,” she said. “There’s a couple of comments here and there, people assuming that I was doing nothing. I have still trained the whole year. It’s been quite a journey to get back but I wouldn’t change it. I’ve actually had a great year.”

For Painter and Meadows, there are aspirations with another athlete in their training group, Georgia Hunter-Bell, a Paris Olympic medallist in the 1500m who is running in the 800m in Tokyo.

For all Hodgkinson’s dominance on track in recent times, there is still a frisson of doubt and she is not afraid to admit she finds getting through the rounds a challenging experience. But ominously for her rivals, who could only watch her running spikes disappear off into the distance in the French capital last summer, she said: “My body’s been through a lot of changes but I’m stronger than I’ve ever been before.” And quite possibly better.

Where to watch

Today
Women’s 100m final 2.13pm

Men’s 100m final, 2.20pm

Julien Alfred earned St Lucia’s first Olympic medal of any kind when she claimed Olympic gold in Paris, while Noah Lyles won the men’s title by five-thousandths of a second. Expect two more tight races today. Britain’s Dina Asher-Smith, Daryll Neita, Jeremiah Azu, Zharnel Hughes and Romell Glave will do well to make it into the finals.

Tomorrow

Men’s pole vault final, 11.49am

Arguably the sport’s biggest
star, Mondo Duplantis is favourite to win a third world title, and
with a $100,000 bonus for a
world record, expect his current mark of 6.29m to go up at least 1cm for his 14th new record!

Wednesday
Men’s 1500m, 2.20pm

Britain’s Josh Kerr faces a likely stacked field as he defends his world title after America’s Cole Hocker shocked everyone by pipping him and Jakob Ingebrigtsen to Olympic gold
in Paris. Dutchman Niels Laros is many pundits’ favourite to win.

Thursday
Men’s 400m, 2.10pm
Women’s 400m, 2.24pm

Could this be the moment for Matthew Hudson-Smith, who has agonisingly missed out on gold in the last two global championships? In the women’s race, the peerless hurdler Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone has taken a gamble by switching to the flat.

Sunday

Women’s 800m, 11.35am

4x100m relays 1.06 & 1.20pm

Keely Hodgkinson is Britain’s biggest favourite for gold after storming back from injuries this year to post a world leading time. Georgia Hunter Bell could even make it a British one-two.
Every event is live on BBC1, BBC2 and iPlayer

Photo credit: Maja Hitij/Getty Images