After all that silver and all those near misses came the golden smile of an Olympic champion on Monday night. Across the course of 800 metres, Keely Hodgkinson became the tallest, brightest and most magnificent tower in Paris.
First she controlled the field and then she tortured it, leaving behind seven women and so many labels before wrapping her outstretched arms around a glorious new status: the queen of British sport.
And how magnificent it was, this journey of deliverance that spanned one minute, 56 seconds and fractions in change.
That wasn’t a world record and nor was it a personal best. In fact it was only a stride better than her semi-final and a good couple of seconds down on what she ran in London two months ago.
And yet it was enough and enough is everything. Because enough is a job well done and, on the biggest night of her young life, in the final of an Olympic Games, a job well done was beating Tsige Duguma of Ethiopia by 0.43sec and the world champion Mary Moraa by a further 0.27sec.
After all that silver and all those near misses came the golden smile of a new Olympic champion on Monday night, writes RIATH AL-SAMARRAI
Across the course of 800 metres, Keely Hodgkinson became the tallest, brightest and most magnificent tower in Paris
First she controlled the field and then she tortured it, leaving behind seven women
With it, Hodgkinson briefly moved her left hand to cover her face, eyes welling, before taking a shining crown from a fan in the crowd and setting off on a victory lap that, for a 22-year-old, has felt an awfully long time in coming.
We should do a quick recap here, because her breakthrough has been both extraordinary and accompanied by an escalating sense of impatience. She was second in the Olympics in 2021 and same again in the world championships of 2022, beaten both times by Athing Mu and tiny margins, before collecting yet another silver at the worlds to Moraa in 2023.
Now a word on silver medals. Silver is lovely. Silver shines bright. But too much silver weighs a lot on your back. Silver can lose its shine. Silver can blind and torment and drive an athlete insane.
And there have been times when Hodgkinson has made it quite clear how mad she feels about all that. Hiding it under platitudes? Not her style. So she came here talking about a ‘mission’ and on a hot and sticky night in France, it was accomplished.
‘That was absolutely incredible,’ she would say. ‘I can’t believe I have finally done it.
‘I am the Olympic champion for the next four years and no one can take that away from me. I can’t believe it. I am so happy I can bring it home.’
And how magnificent it was, this journey of deliverance that spanned one minute and 56 seconds
With it, she briefly moved her left hand to cover her face, eyes welling, before grabbing a Union flag
So she came here talking about a ‘mission’ and on a hot and sticky night in France, it was accomplished
That she did, becoming Team GB’s first female track and field athlete to win gold since Jesicca Ennis-Hill.
It was watching Ennis-Hill on Super Saturday that put this runaway train in motion, so one can only wonder what dreamers Hodgkinson will inspire. From there we might ask, too, how much further she will climb when her coaches and all conventional wisdom suggest she is five years shy of her peak.
Those are conversations for another day. In the here and now we can already discuss greatness. And here’s the thing about that – invitations to greatness are everywhere at an Olympics, with the mere caveat that you are man or woman enough to be ready with your greatest effort at the moment of greatest importance and greatest stress.
For some those three lines shape into a ladder; to others they are the Bermuda Triangle.
Hodgkinson will have seen Molly Caudery in the pole vault earlier in the day. Greatness had called for her and as the best in the world this year, Caudery had earned her invite. But she wasn’t ready – the sheer magnitude of what it all meant crushed her. It does that to people but it couldn’t do that to Hodgkinson.
With greatness watching and waiting, Hodgkinson delivered one hell of a show.
Granted, she was assisted by the absence of Mu, who failed to make it through the US trials and thus delayed a continuation of a tremendous rivalry. But even Mu has never matched the 1:54.61 best set by Hodgkinson this summer, and none of these women, Moraa included had got within two seconds of it in the whole of 2024, and so there was no ambiguity around her tactics.
She went straight to the front. It was a statement and a message – keep up if you can.
For one lap, ticked off in a relatively slow 58.30sec they could, but unlike 2021 Hodgkinson was calling the pace and calling the shots. Unlike 2022 Hodgkinson was not penned in on the inside. Unlike 2023 she knew she had the legs to beat them all if it came to a kick-off.
But with Moraa on Hodgkinson’s right shoulder, there was still cause to view this a live race, because the Kenyan has good 400m speed in isolation and has outrun Hodgkinson before. That might have triggered panic, but there was none from this star of Wigan, just a gentle turning of the screw any time Moraa tried to up her pace
Should she go early and burn off Mary Moraa (right), who beat her at both the Commonwealth Games in 2022 and the worlds last year?
Naturally, we half wondered if those years of silver medals build barriers, like the majors have done to Rory McIlroy in golf
The afterburner went on, the class showed, she pulled away, a vision of greatness and a woman at peace with a brilliant new label
Every little kick was returned with two of interest, and then, like Mo Farah at his best, the move to break the rest came on the home straight. One metre of daylight became two became three, and the cost of trying saw Moraa passed by Duguma.
Good on them, they busted guts to make up that ground.
But neither of them could touch an athlete who had grabbed this final by the scruff of the neck with one hand and greatness with the other.
