Paris 2024 Olympics: Keely Hodgkinson on ‘navigating’ the mazy road to 800m gold
For someone so used to living life in the fast lane, it’s no surprise that GB’s 800m phenomenon Keely Hodgkinson falls back on racing terminology when describing her Paris 2024 journey.
But what is more surprising is that the word she repeats throughout her conversation with Olympics.com has nothing to do with speed or pace, or even winning.
Instead, Hodgkinson’s word of choice coming into these Games seems to be “navigate”.
It’s as if Olympic gold sits at the end of a winding map, or even a maze where there are many paths an athlete can take to reach the final destination, but almost all of them finish with dead ends.
Hodgkinson has experienced those dead ends three times at major athletics competitions. Firstly, as a hungry 19-year-old, an underdog in the Olympic final in Tokyo, who navigated her way to the medal race but found the road to Olympic gold blocked - just - by the slightly faster legs of the reigning gold medallist Athing Mu.
Mu repeated the feat at her home world championships in 2022, before another challenger, Kenya’s Mary Moraa, proved to be the impassable obstacle at the Worlds in 2023.
And while Hodgkinson entered these Olympics in Paris as the favourite, having posted the fastest time in the world this year and become the sixth-fastest 800m runner in history in her last race before these Games, she seems well aware that while the track at the Stade de France seems to be a simple combination of bends and straight lines, the race for gold will need a skilled and tactical navigator.
“Every race is very different and it does depend on who’s beside you in the race,” the 22-year-old Hodgkinson explained. “Also, you don’t know what people have got in their locker. Like I say, with the times on the sheet, someone could PB by a whole second, you’re just not aware of that, so I don’t like putting too much into times and just focus on putting together a race that I’d be really happy with that will get me the result I want.
“I’ll just go with that approach each round and navigate like that.”
Keely Hodgkinson on looking inwards on her quest for glory in Paris
The idea of navigating your way to gold starts long before an Olympic final. It’s something Hodgkinson’s rival Mu found out the hard way when a devastating fall at the US Olympic trials left her hopes of defending her title in Paris in tatters.
Hodgkinson’s road to Paris did not include such a cut-throat all-or-nothing race to decide her Olympic fate, even affording her the luxury of being able to run the 400m at the British trials to work on the speed she’ll need to navigate her way to Olympic gold.
At the London Diamond League on 20 July, that speed was on full display as she raced to victory in a new British record of 1:54.61 - a time that would have handily won Olympic gold in Tokyo.
But again, while her mark that day may have given her a much-wanted boost just a week before Paris 2024, she is aware that it was just another door passed through on the mazy journey to the top of the Olympic podium.
“It did fill me with a lot of confidence, but for me it was more that I stuck to a pace that I wanted to commit to, I didn’t back off from it at any point…
“It’s hard to trust yourself when you’ve got someone [Jemma Reekie] coming up behind you the entire way, everyone wants to beat you and you’ve got to trust that you’re not going to die at this blistering pace... I think that’s a good way of not focusing too much on the time and more on how you’re going to run.”
Keely Hodgkinson on being labelled favourite for Paris gold: 'It's a privilege, but I’ll just be trying to navigate each round'
If the road to gold could be plotted out on paper, we’d all be able to guess the medal winners at Paris 2024 far ahead of the Games.
Yet anyone familiar with the wild surprises the Olympics can throw up knows that one wrong turn can lead to lost opportunities that won’t present themselves again for another four years.
Hodgkinson is experienced enough to know that being a favourite on paper means nothing when the fruits of years of work since Tokyo 2020 depend on navigating the smallest margins in a race that lasts less than two minutes.
“Well, it's now been labelled as my race to lose, apparently!” she says, her voice hinting at the absurdity of any suggestion that just turning up will be enough to take home gold. “It's a privileged position to be in, but for me, I’ll just be trying to navigate each round and take it day by day and go from there, really.”
You can watch Keely Hodgkinson in the Paris 2024 800m final on 5 August.