Keely Hodgkinson – from injuries and tears to gold medal favourite

We talk to coach Trevor Painter and physio Alison Rose about how Keely Hodgkinson has been able to leap from world championship worry to 800m gold medal favourite

It says much about how difficult the past year has been for Keely Hodgkinson that her feeling “like she’d been run over by a bus” was seen as being a positive thing. “She felt dreadful for a couple of days,” says the Olympic 800m champion’s coach, Trevor Painter. “But then she trained again and, even though she wasn’t feeling great, the numbers were really good, so we knew her body was okay.”

There was good reason for this particular pain and suffering – it meant she was racing again. Painter is describing the immediate aftermath of Hodgkinson’s first outing in over a year – 376 days to be precise – at the Silesia Diamond League in Poland on August 16. Having had to absorb and recover from three hamstring injury blows that combined to keep her on the sidelines since her golden night in Paris last summer, the 23-year-old opted against a low-key return.
Back on the start line, there was no easing herself back in gently. Hodgkinson promptly blew the cobwebs, and the opposition, away with the second-fastest time of her career – a world-leading 1:54.74 that only fell fractionally short of her British record (1:54.61).

As a statement of intent, it could barely have been any stronger. Immediately, the narrative around Hodgkinson flipped from whether or not she would even reach this month’s world championships to her becoming the cast iron favourite for gold.

This, says Painter, is what can happen when she is presented with a challenge.

“I was a bit more nervous than normal [ahead of Silesia] but I knew she was fine,” he says. “She’d passed all the tests with the physios and the things that we have to make sure that everything was good. I was slightly apprehensive, but that was more about ‘how big can this be?’, rather than ‘is she going to get round?’. I was very confident she would run 1:55 and I was confident she could run 1:54, so I’m just glad it came out.”

In fact, most of the trepidation came after the race, and the questions about how Hodgkinson’s body might react to being put under such stress again.

“It’s been a neural problem that’s caused the issues and the neural system [or nervous system] is what gets stressed the most in a performance like that,” says Painter. “If she had gone out and run 1:57 we wouldn’t…