Keely Hodgkinson keen to embody her teenage self in bid for world title glory

Keely Hodgkinson is drawing inspiration from her teenage self as she bids for a maiden world title at this weekend’s indoor championships in Poland.

Last month, the 24-year-old Olympic 800m champion – who celebrated her birthday on March 3 – set her first official world record of one minute 54.87secs, shaving nearly a second off the previous women’s indoor 800m standard set by Jolanda Ceplak on the day she was born.

Now Hodgkinson is targeting another serendipitous achievement, this time at the Arena Torun, the same venue where she claimed her first senior title at the indoor European championships in 2021.

“I’m embracing my 19-year-old fearless, doesn’t think too much, just turns up kind of attitude,” said Hodgkinson.

“It’s working for me. I’m just having fun with everything. Competition brings so many different things, you don’t actually know what is going to happen, and that’s the exciting thing about a global championships.”

This is Hodgkinson’s first time at world indoors after injuries prevented her from competing in the last three, including late withdrawal four years ago.

“It’s the one medal I don’t have,” Hodgkinson said. “So that would be really great to box that one off. Just happy to make the start line this time.

“Until I cross the finish line, I’m not going to jinx anything, but I’m excited to be here, excited to compete. The competition looks great and we’ll see what happens.”

Hodgkinson has found freedom in not setting any specific goals for the indoor season and has put her full faith in coach Trevor Painter to choose the right races.

She said: “I told my coach ‘I don’t want to know where you want me. I don’t want to know when you want me to race. I just want to get through each week, each training camp and see where it goes’.”

Last February, Hodgkinson was forced to pull out of her own Keely Klassic event in Birmingham with a hamstring injury, especially frustrating because she had hoped to target the world record there.

She was absent from the competition circuit for 376 days when she returned to set a world-lead in Silesia in mid-August last year and battled to an admirable 800m bronze at the world championships last September in Tokyo, where the heats, semi-final and final were just her third, fourth and fifth races of the year.

Audrey Werro is perhaps the likeliest woman to stand between Hodgkinson and the title, but she was more than three seconds faster than her Swiss rival when they faced off in the Briton’s world-record setting race.

Hodgkinson added: “I was out quite a lot of last year with injuries, so I just wanted to enjoy the process of getting fit and seeing how far we could go in training, and the closer we got to the date I was like ‘yeah, this is on. I can do this’.

“I just really believed in myself that day. I kind of knew it was going to happen. It was just a case of what’s the time going to be.”