Her coach Trevor Painter talks through the 12 races that shaped Hodgkinson’s 2024, leading to the promised land of Olympic glory
For Keely Hodgkinson, the beginning of the athletics year normally revolves around the indoor season. Her coaching team of Trevor Painter and Jenny Meadows like to use it to “break the winter monotony” and “work a lot more on intensity and speed”.
With the biggest summer of her life on the horizon, however, injuries to the 22-year-old’s knee and hamstring closed the door on the chance to compete in front of a home crowd at the World Indoor Championships in Glasgow.
It was one of a few hurdles that needed to be cleared on the road to Paris, where everything was ultimately alright on the night for the 800m star who emulated one of her heroes, Kelly Holmes, by becoming Olympic champion over the two-lap distance.
It’s a performance that did much to earn her your vote as British Female Athlete of the Year in the 2024 AW Readers’ Awards but there were other highlights and important landmarks along the way during a campaign that saw Hodgkinson race 12 times in total, winning every 800m she contested.
Painter sat down to talk through the summer, race by race, and how each played its part in laying the path to gold.
Keely Hodgkinson (Getty)
Savona International Meeting (May 15)
400m – 51.61
“It was the first time since 2020 that Keely hadn’t done an indoor season and, if we’d had a couple more weeks, we’d have been in Glasgow,” says Painter. “But if you get an injury you’ve got to be patient and, come May, we knew she was healthy and ready to go.
“Because of the injury restrictions, we couldn’t do any of the really fast stuff and had to just park that for a while. It gave us an opportunity to work a lot deeper on aspects like strength and conditioning.
“We came into the summer with a much bigger base and thankfully the speed was still there because she opened the year with a 400m PB, so we must have done something right.
“She doesn’t get many opportunities to run 400m so you just pray for a fast track and good weather but, sure enough, just as the athletes went to the blocks, it started to rain. It was like: ‘Are you serious?’ Keely came second and the athlete that won the race, Sharlene Mawdsley, went on to run some really fast times. Keely wasn’t too far behind her so, if she’d had more opportunities at 400m, I feel she’d have run sub-51 at some stage in the summer.”
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