Keely Hodgkinson: Great Britain’s Olympic 800m gold medallist eyes ‘world domination’ in pursuit of 43-year-old world record | Athletics News

Lying horizontal in absolute agony, puffing heavily trying to get as much oxygen back into her lungs, Keely Hodgkinson is hurting.

She’s just completed a set of 400m training runs on the outdoor track at the Manchester Regional Arena right next door to Manchester City’s stadium. There is still some light blue ticker tape catching on the breeze left over from City’s send off to Pep Guardiola.

Hodgkinson doesn’t notice or care. Full on, flat out, pushing her body beyond limits mere mortals could tolerate.

But… the pain was worth it.

“Now she has the hard evidence in data from training. She doesn’t just hope to break the 800m women’s world record, she knows she can.”

Hodgkinson adds: “For me, I get all my confidence from training and from Trevor and Jenny, and from the evidence that we run on the track. Days like this is what make it all worth it – the headaches, the early mornings, the long days, the busy appointments, all this and that I really do put my life towards it. It just makes it worth it.

“Now my job is to go out and execute that in a race and make it real. I’ll take it as a really good challenge, it brings out the best in me. Hopefully, it’s a very exciting summer ahead. I feel like it’s going to be so.”

So when will a challenge to the oldest world record in athletics come? Clearly it’s been on the cards and in the minds of Hodgkinson and her coaches, but as they say, they go by the evidence.

Painter and Meadows believe if everything is in the right place then next month at the London Diamond League meeting could be the perfect setting for Hodgkinson.

“Well we know when she’d like to do it,” Meadows says. “She would love to do it this year in London at the Diamond League. She won there in 2024 which set her up for the Paris Olympic gold.

“She’d love to do it in the London Olympic Stadium with a British crowd.”

Painter put into context some other reasons why Hodgkinson can break the 800m world record and why it remains a daunting sporting challenge:

“Shoe technology has advanced so much, track technology has advanced a lot, our understanding of everything and the athletes’ understanding is growing all the time so it is getting closer and closer and I believe she believes she can do it now and I believe she can as well,” he says.

“You need so many factors to go right on the actual day, the weather needs to be great, you need a bit of a crowd behind you to give someone like Keely that lift and then you need the race to go the right way.”

Hodgkinson adds: “We’re trying to push limits this year. Courage has been my word of the year. Last year was freedom, this year it’s courage, so we’re trying to just be courageous. And that comes with risk – risk gets reward with courage.”

Now comes a note of caution. Breaking a world record set in 1983 is not a given and many have fallen in sport after high hopes.

“I think sometimes if you want things too much sometimes it can go wrong with things like that. I’m very much taking the approach this year of enjoying the process, taking it week by week seeing what my body can handle and can do and just seeing what results come with that,” Hodgkinson says. “On paper I’m still a second and a half away, which seems like a big chunk so I’m hoping to take some chunks off that this season.”

Should Hodgkinson break the 800m world record this year, or even in the next few years, she’s aware of the historical significance.

“I do feel like it would be really great history and I think it’s something a lot of people would enjoy to see, especially this generation of athletes that we’ve got,” Hodgkinson says. “The girls that we have right now have standards getting higher and higher every year. Everyone else is running faster, we’re just all running faster and we’ve got to start somewhere.

“It is something I do think about and something I would love to do. I’m definitely in the best shape mentally to do it, physically, but those kind of times that we’re talking about, every decimal point, every tenth matters.

“For me, I’ve always said that the world record is not a case of if, but when. I can’t always plan for when… I would say it’s in my sights and it’s something I see as breakable and achievable.”

Who set the 800m women’s world record and why has it stood since 1983?

Kratochvilova set the women’s 800m world record on July 26, 1983 in Munich.

Originally Kratochvilova was a 400m runner with the intention of doubling up with the 200m. Instead she ran an 800m race in 1983 and set the world record which has stood ever since: 1:53:28.

Over the past four decades some have described the record as toxic, with accusations of doping. However, while details are now known about the state-organised programme of East Germany, for example, in the former Czechoslovakia less is known about how athletes were coached and cared for in the 1970s and 1980s.

Now in her 70s, Kratochvilova has always vehemently denied she took performance enhancing drugs, insisting her performances on the track were down to the hard, physical work her coach Miroslav Kvac adopted, including her upbringing on a farm and a rigorous weight training regime.

In the intervening 43 years, no athlete has managed to get particularly close to Kratochvilov’s world record – no one has run under one minute and 54 seconds.

The second-fastest women’s 800m is largely forgotten: it was set by Nadezhda Olizarenko when running for the former Soviet Union (USSR) in 1980, who was only 15 hundredth’s of a second slower than Kratochvilova.

South African Caster Semenya’s fastest 800m is almost a second slower that the current world record. She ran that time in 2018.

Hodgkinson currently has two of the top 10 fastest 800m times – 7th & 10th fastest – and her best mark currently stands at 1:54:61, which is the UK national record.