Keely Hodgkinson expects her hotly-anticipated European title showdown with new nemesis Audrey Werro will make the women’s 800 metres the “race of the championships” in Birmingham.
The British Olympic gold medallist was beaten by the Swiss athlete in Stockholm in June, where Werro went third on the all-time list before running even faster three weeks later in Paris to enter this week’s European Athletics Championships with a world-leading one minute, 53.80 seconds.
Both women have declared their intent to take down Jarmila Kratochvilova’s 43-year-old world record, while the Netherlands’ Femke Broeders-Bol, one of the greatest 400m hurdlers, has also splashed into the 800m waters and holds the third-fastest time this season.
“We’ve spoken about (what they might do) a little bit,” said Hodgkinson. “Obviously I need to get through the rounds and just be in that final, but ultimately I’ll just focus on what I can do best and control my race.
“I don’t know what anyone else is going to do, but I think it’s going to be the race of the championships. I think it’s going to be really fun, so I’m excited.”
All four of the world’s top women at 800m this year are European. French record-holder Anais Bourgoin rounds out the quartet of Birmingham competitors who have dipped below one minute, 56 seconds.
The only other woman to do so this year, Hodgkinson’s training partner Georgia Hunter Bell, is focusing on the 1500m, the same distance at which she is an Olympic bronze medallist.
Hodgkinson insists defending her European title for a second time would mean “just as much to me, almost, as winning in Paris (at the Olympics)”, because it would be a first on home soil.
She “hasn’t spent too much time” with Werro, though Hodgkinson admits the 22-year-old took her by surprise in Stockholm.
“I don’t really think I did anything wrong in that race,” the 24-year-old insisted.
“I didn’t know what she was capable of at that point. I think that just shows you like you can’t underestimate anybody. If you look at all our other head-to-heads, you wouldn’t have thought she was going to hang on.
“I think that’s where I was at that point in the season. It was my opening race. I think people are trying to make me feel like it was a failure and it really wasn’t. That was a British record. It was my fastest time ever and I’m going to remind myself of that because I’m proud of that.”
Hodgkinson, who has worked through a few fitness concerns already this season, still has her fair share of online critics.
They can be cruel, wrong, and sometimes downright bizarre.
It was never in Hodgkinson’s plans to compete at the Glasgow Commonwealth Games, where Hunter Bell claimed the 800m title.
Yet Hodgkinson revealed: “Me and Georgia were laughing the other day because we saw a TikTok, and it was like ‘Georgia Bell pays Keely £200k to not do the Commonwealth Games.
“I thought, ‘well, I didn’t get that money so where the f***’s it going’. People make up stuff. We just laugh about it. But it’s a strange world we live in sometimes.”
