Keely Hodgkinson on ‘navigating’ the mazy road to 800m gold

For somebody so used to dwelling life within the quick lane, it’s no shock that GB’s 800m phenomenon Keely Hodgkinson falls again on racing terminology when describing her Paris 2024 journey.

However what’s extra stunning is that the phrase she repeats all through her dialog with Olympics.com has nothing to do with pace or tempo, and even profitable.

As a substitute, Hodgkinson’s phrase of alternative coming into these Video games appears to be “navigate”.

It’s as if Olympic gold sits on the finish of a winding map, or perhaps a maze the place there are a lot of paths an athlete can take to achieve the ultimate vacation spot, however nearly all of them end with lifeless ends.

Hodgkinson has skilled these lifeless ends thrice at main athletics competitions. Firstly, as a hungry 19-year-old, an underdog within the Olympic ultimate in Tokyo, who navigated her solution to the medal race however discovered the street to Olympic gold blocked – simply – by the marginally quicker legs of the reigning gold medallist Athing Mu.

Mu repeated the feat at her dwelling world championships in 2022, earlier than one other challenger, Kenya’s Mary Moraa, proved to be the impassable impediment on the Worlds in 2023.

And whereas Hodgkinson entered these Olympics in Paris because the favorite, having posted the quickest time on the planet this 12 months and turn out to be the sixth-fastest 800m runner in historical past in her final race earlier than these Video games, she appears nicely conscious that whereas the monitor on the Stade de France appears to be a easy mixture of bends and straight traces, the race for gold will want a talented and tactical navigator.

“Each race may be very completely different and it does rely on who’s beside you within the race,” the 22-year-old Hodgkinson defined. “Additionally, you don’t know what folks have gotten of their locker. Like I say, with the instances on the sheet, somebody might PB by an entire second, you’re simply not conscious of that, so I don’t like placing an excessive amount of into instances and simply deal with placing collectively a race that I’d be actually proud of that can get me the end result I need.

“I’ll simply go together with that strategy every spherical and navigate like that.”