The secrets behind Keely Hodgkinson’s pursuit of gold and a notorious world record

At 7:30pm local time on Sunday evening Keely Hodgkinson will emerge from the call room buried deep inside the arena that made her a star four years ago.

Clutching a water bottle in her right hand, she will leap up and down on the spot a couple of times, run on the spot for three or four seconds and, only when she is ready, stride down the home straight towards the start line with every pair of eyes in Tokyo’s national stadium trained on her.

It has become a familiar routine for the reigning Olympic 800m champion. No longer the nearly-woman, Hodgkinson is now a feared woman. Opponents refuse to lead her out, choosing to follow her every footstep instead of backing themselves.

And once the fussy hamstrings that threatened to write off this year obey, she seems destined for an era of dominance in an event that does not often harbour long-reigning queens.

That the pre-race discussion will focus on how fast she can go as much as her odds of winning underlines just how dominant we all expect her to be. Like Faith Kipyegon and Mondo Duplantis, track and field’s other two bankers, the question has become not if she will win but how. Which is a peculiar place to be since she is not yet a world champion and this season almost never happened.

Victory on Sunday would overwrite the pair of bittersweet silvers earned at the 2022 and 2023 worlds, not to forget the second-placed breakthrough the last time she raced a final in Tokyo’s National Stadium. Back then Hodgkinson’s coaches, Trevor Painter and Jenny Meadows, were already certain she had the talent and commitment to be among the world’s best. But for almost anyone outside the training group now known as M11, her initial Olympic experience, aged 19, was the first time that potential was shown to a global TV audience.

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The podium finish, behind another prodigiously talented teen in Athing Mu inside an eerie, empty stadium that will be near full on Sunday, was an undoubtedly brilliant mainstream breakthrough but Hodgkinson has never been satisfied by second. Her subsequent world silvers in Budapest and Oregon were met with equal helpings of frustration and celebration, building the nearly-woman narrative that was demolished so emphatically in Paris 13 months ago.

Rare is the Olympic champion who covets a world title more but the hurdles Hodgkinson has overcome since those 116.7secs of total dominance at the Stade de France, and her unfinished business in Japan, makes such desire easy to understand.

There have been three hamstring injuries, the late withdrawal from her eponymous Keely Classic, when she was eyeing the indoor world record, several false starts on the Diamond League and, as Meadows said, “a bucket full of tears” with Hodgkinson admitting her “unpredictable moods” had her training partners on edge.

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Meadows said she overheard Painter singing along to Elton John’s The Bitch is Back while in the shower shortly before Hodgkinson raced for the first time in 376 days. The inference was clear and Hodgkinson ended up clocking 1min 54.74secs in Silesia, a time no one else has come close to in 2025. Since then she has sharpened and trained without a hiccup, which is why the feeling of how, not if is so strong.

“It will mean even more than last year,” she has said repeatedly in the past few days. She has never enjoyed going through the rounds, an environment fraught with danger because the line between conserving energy for the final and not doing anything silly is so fine, but the delivery of one comment on her post-heat media rounds stood out. “It can feel worse when I'm running 1:59 than it does when I'm running 1:55.”

The final bit was said so casually it is easy to forget only nine women have run under that time. It also pointed to Hodgkinson’s goal of breaking Jarmila Kratochvilova’s world record of 1min 53.28secs.

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Painter and Meadows have long been convinced she can eventually eclipse one of the sport’s most notorious marks, set in 1983. Stifling, sticky Tokyo is unlikely to provide conditions conducive to the fastest time ever and Painter was being entirely serious last year when he said she is several years from peaking. But Hodgkinson, whose current best of 1min 54.61secs makes her the sixth fastest of all time, was not ruling it out before travelling. “I do believe that 1min 53secs is possible,” she said. “Whether it comes out or not, I don’t know. It would be great if that was now.”

It is worth considering, too, that even Seb Coe, the World Athletics president, has spoken enthusiastically about the potential of Hodgkinson erasing Kratochvilova’s name from the ledger. The record arrived at a time of state-run doping in the Eastern Bloc and the Czech holder, also one of only two before this week to run sub-48secs for 400m, was widely suspected of not racing clean — though she has always vehemently denied all accusations.

Before these championships, which on the whole have been below par for the British team, Coe predicted Hodgkinson will “absolutely” go down as one of the kingdom’s greatest ever sportspeople. Hodgkinson herself has repeatedly said the ultimate goal is to be remembered as an all-time great decades from now.

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Like so many of the best, she is more than willing to embrace the pressure and expectations; the anticipation makes her run faster and the attention is welcome.

Off the track Hodgkinson is every bit the modern day celebrity, possessing a huge social media following, though that brings familiar discomfort. During the darkest days of her injury nightmare she would receive frequent messages from know-nothings sat on their sofas. Why was she at a fashion show instead of rehabbing her injury? What is she doing on TV, shouldn’t she be cross-training? There was even a ludicrous conspiracy theory that she was not injured at all but serving a ban – something Hodgkinson admirably batted away with a laugh in a recent YouTube video.

For all the Armani shows, Loose Women appearances and lifestyle magazine covers, those who know Hodgkinson well quickly volunteer that she possesses bags full of Northern grit and stubbornness to extract the maximum from her obscene natural ability.

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Mentally, Coe says, she is “mahogany hard” and the former men’s world record holder has no shortage of praise for her coaching team, who have developed an environment from which fellow medal hopeful Georgia Hunter Bell and Irishwoman Sarah Healy have subsequently thrived.

One major development on Hodgkinson’s road to recovery was Painter convincing Nike to fund a full-time physiotherapist who checks her over before every single session. They tracked the source of her hamstring injuries to an issue in the lower back and if her pre-session examination is unsatisfactory she is not allowed to work out.

They have also been early adaptors to technology such as the now-omnipresent Maurten bicarb system, a special cooling vest that caught plenty of attention in Paris and maintain regular dialogue with Nike’s shoe developers around how to improve their next models.

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That cutting-edge approach is intertwined with training that is far from glamourous. In South Africa, where she spends much of the winter, the off-season sessions are gruelling. Painter has been known to take his group to the sand dunes of Formby to build strength – mental as well as physical – and before major championships she faces one particular session that serves as an accurate predictor of what shape she is in.

It is both simple and brutal. She runs 400m all out, rests for 30 seconds and runs another 400m at top effort. Before the Tokyo Olympics the session added up to 1:55.3, in the final she ran 1:55.88.

What Hodgkinson clocked before these championships will be kept in-house for now but the indications are clear: barring an unforeseen development, it will be enough to turn those silvers into gold and British athletics’ poster girl will take another big stride towards rarefied air.