'Golden girls' could inspire new era of Team GB glory

UK athletics has not been so expectant since London 2012, with stars like Keely Hodgkinson destined to excel in Paris

- BEN BLOOM

Keely Hodgkinson really should have won her first world 800m title last summer. That’s what the numbers said, and athletics is nothing if not a numbers game.

With her main rival, America’s Olympic champion Athing Mu, struggling for form, fitness and fire after the upheaval of turning professional, Hodgkinson, 22, lined up in the final in Budapest last August as the fastest in the field that year. The race was hers to lose. And lose she did, outsprinted down the home straight by Kenya’s Mary Moraa.

Never again, she vowed. Never again would she be defeated in a major final. And never again would she trust the numbers.

“A championship is a completely clean slate for me,” she insisted on Saturday after an astonishing 800m performance that ranks sixth fastest of all time. “I’ve come into championships ranked 10th and finished second. I was world No 1 last year and finished second. Times aren’t everything, so for me it’s a case of getting to the final and then we’ll start thinking about medals.”

It is the type of mindset that an athlete must maintain if they are to succeed at the very top.

Us humble spectators are not constrained by such mental chicanery, freeing up the not-so-bold prediction of Hodgkinson being as nailed on to win Olympic gold in Paris next month as any British athlete in recent decades. After her performance at last weekend’s London Diamond League, defeat is bordering on unthinkable for British athletics’ queen-in-waiting.

The extent of Hodgkinson’s victory – coming in a time of 1min 54.61secs, the fastest in the world since 2018 – was such that it even prompted the notion that Jarmila Kratochvilova’s world record of 1.53:28 from 1983 might soon be beatable. Hodgkinson suggested it betrayed the true level of her expectations.