Since Keely Hodgkinson had crossed the line, she was at a loss for what to do for the very first time all through the night. She gazed up at the board for a moment, just to be sure, and then she looked up once more, just to be absolutely certain. Her face trembled as she took in the news: Hodgkinson had finally been awarded the gold medal, and the Olympic Games provided the crowning moment for the most recent athletics hero to emerge from Great Britain.
The goal that Hodgkinson had in mind when she arrived in Paris was to improve upon the silver medal she had won in Tokyo three years prior, as well as to break the pattern of finishing in second place at big events. The 22-year-old athlete delivered, transforming her talent into a winner as she won a spectacular gold medal in the 800-meter race at the Stade de France. Her race was clever, and she crossed the finish line with gutsy determination.
After that, Hodgkinson embarked on a lap of pure excitement while simultaneously pumping her fist into the air and clutching the British flag in her right arm. When she followed in the footsteps of Kelly Holmes and won the 800-meter gold medal at the Olympics, she also claimed the first gold medal for Great Britain on the track since Mo Farah’s double in 2016. She chose a crown that matched the symbolic significance of the event.
From the moment she was declared the last person on the track, Hodgkinson had been in complete command of the situation. She had been calm and present during the entire race, dashing past her block in the middle lane and taking her time on the walk back to her position. She rushed to the front of the pack with scientific precision throughout the first lap of the race, making sure to keep her head motionless while her arms pumped and her legs whirred underneath her.
She would not let go of you. Mary Moraa, the reigning world champion, clung to her shoulder for as long as she could. She placed herself to her right. However, as Hodgkinson neared the final curve and realized that the moment she had been waiting for so fervently was just ahead and ready to be claimed, she just pushed off and demonstrated her superiority, winning the race in 1 minute, 56 seconds, and seventy-two seconds.
In 1:57:42, Moraa finished in third place, and Tsige Duguma of Kenya finished in second place with a personal best time of 1:57:15. When compared to her personal best, which she had established in London a month before, Hodgkinson was almost two seconds behind. Following the acquisition of this first major trophy, she is only going to continue to improve.
At the most recent Olympics, her entire world was turned upside down. Despite the fact that it will do so once more after winning an Olympic championship, Hodgkinson will be ready for what is to come.
When she was only 19 years old, she surprised everyone by winning a silver medal in Tokyo, breaking Kelly Holmes’s record for the British. Before she won that medal, everything she had known changed. She left college to devote her entire time to her sport, she moved out of her parents’ house to live on her own, and she was thrust into the spotlight as the great next hope before she had the opportunity to comprehend the significance of winning an Olympic silver medal.
There was a comedown, a calculation that this was the bar, and it had been set so high. It is no wonder that there was a comedown. Because when a young athlete achieves their first accomplishment, there is a strong expectation that they will continue to improve upon it and achieve even greater success in the future, as if a career is a line on a graph that never stops climbing. The problem with Hodgkinson, on the other hand, is that she persists in doing precisely what she has always done, even when she was left with the disappointment of silver after winning two world championships in a row.
Despite the fact that she became a prominent figure in British sports and received substantial financial support from companies such as Nike, Louis Vuitton, and a variety of other sponsors, she continued to be committed to her straightforward art. If the fact that we won silver at the world championship behind Athing Mu in 2022 and then silver again behind Moraa in 2023 seems like we are trapped in the same spot, stuck in second place, then what we fail to recognize is how passionately the desire within us began to burn to make the next step.
It’s possible that the near misses formed her identity. Hodgkinson, on the other hand, would not even entertain the idea of considering another before Paris. When she walked off the track in Budapest after the world championships in August of last year, she made a solemn promise to herself that she would never again finish in second place at a major competition. A replica of the silver that had been so significant three years earlier would no longer be considered a prize; rather, it would be a representation of what had been disregarded.
What was at stake was not only winning gold but also winning brilliantly. The most popular candidate was Hodgkinson. Before the Olympics, she ran the 800 meters in a time of 1 minute, 54 seconds, and 61 seconds at the London Diamond League in July, which was the sixth-fastest time in the history of the event. This time, set a new personal best for her. Due to the fact that Mu, the defending champion, had fallen during the trials for the United States Olympic Games, the Olympics were deprived of a significant rivalry. Although Moraa was on the verge of capturing the world championship title, no one else in the final had run a time that was less than 1 minute and 56 seconds.
