Her rival, the world champion, Mary Moraa of Kenya, is bristling, striding up and down and all around, but Hodgkinson is sitting motionless, eyes fixed, jaw clenched, mouth turned down, running through her mind, one last time, how she wants the race to go. Outside, the 70,000 people in the stadium are roaring for the men's pole vault. Hodgkinson can hardly hear them.
Hodgkinson, 22, has been thinking about this race ever since she was a 10-year-old girl watching Jessica Ennis win the heptathlon on TV at London 2012. And of course she has been here once before, three years ago, when, only 19, she came from nowhere to win the silver behind the US's 19-year-old phenomenon Athing Mu at the Tokyo Games. Hodgkinson was so excited by it that she didn't sleep for the next two nights because of the adrenaline in her system. It hardly seemed like a defeat. But over time the high began to wear off. She realised silver wasn't what she wanted.
This story is from the August 06, 2024 edition of The Guardian.
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This story is from the August 06, 2024 edition of The Guardian.
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