On the eve of the World Athletics Championships in Budapest, Keely Hodgkinson is talking excitedly about a photo she recently shared with her childhood friend, the England footballer Ella Toone. “There’s a big picture of her face at Old Trafford,” she says. “It’s massive! I sent it to her the other day. It’s amazing to watch in one year how much women’s football has come on, and how many have been watching the Women’s World Cup. Hopefully they can go on and win it.”
The 800m star only has joy in her heart when she speaks about Toone, who she used to do cross-country and play football with at Fred Longworth High School in Tyldesley, Greater Manchester. But Britain’s best chance of a gold medal in Budapest also understandably craves similar levels of attention for her sport. Her message is stark, and a little wistful. “Hopefully we can do something good and get people back and in love with athletics.”
If anyone can rekindle the old love affair between track and field and the British public, it is surely Hodgkinson, whose crossover appeal was highlighted by a recent Vogue profile that hailed her as “the new It girl of athletics”.
It girl? More like Now girl. In the past two years, the 21-year-old has won Olympic and world silver medals, three European titles and – for good measure – is the fastest woman over 800m in the world in 2023. She has a claim to be Britain’s best female athlete in any sport. It’s just that most don’t realise it.
“I guess I’ve never been stopped in the street, to be honest,” Hodgkinson says. “But it depends where I am and who’s around as to whether I get approached. In an athletics environment, it’s going to be a lot more. I’ve been out with my friends, at Albert’s Schloss in Manchester, and someone has come over who is into athletics.”
Does she wish she was more recognised? “I do quite like going to training, then going home to recover and not having anything to disturb me,” Hodgkinson adds. “But honestly, when you look back to the old days it has changed. Definitely. I’m sure Jessica Ennis probably couldn’t go many places without being recognised after 2012. I do think us athletes work a lot harder than some other sports and we don’t get the recognition we deserve. I don’t know how, but hopefully we will get there.”
The launch of a Netflix track and field series, along with the Olympic Games in Paris, should help. But Hodgkinson also knows that a first world title would be a massive head start - although the presence of Olympic and world 800m champion Athing Mu, and Kenyan Mary Moraa, won’t make it easy.
So how might Britain do at these championships? Well, Athletics Weekly magazine predicts six medals: four individual – Hodgkinson (800m), Zharnel Hughes (100m), Josh Kerr (1500m) and Katarina Johnson-Thompson (heptathlon) – and two in the men’s and women’s 4x100m relays. That would represent a par score given GB has won between five and seven medals at every world championships stretching back to 2007.
They could yet do better. Certainly there are others in the 55-strong British team who are live contenders for the podium, including Dina Asher-Smith in the 100m and 200m, Laura Muir in the 1500m and Jemma Reekie in the 800m. But, as always, optimism is tinged with uncertainty.
The British team will certainly hope to get off to a good start on the opening weekend, however, with Hughes, the fastest man over 100m this season, and 2019 world champion Johnson-Thompson leading the charge. And while some doubts remain over Hughes’s temperament given his false start in the Tokyo Olympic final, he insists he is a changed man in 2023 having broken both Linford Christie’s British 100m record and John Regis’s 200m best in the space of a month.
“My mindset has changed,” he says. “I’m putting in the work that needed to be put in and I was able to do a lot more plyometrics that I wasn’t able to do in the past because of injuries. I’m now able to be explosive and I’m putting out forces I wasn’t able to put out before.”
Hughes also promises that neither the pressure of the occasion, nor his rivals, will get to him. “They try to intimidate you,” he adds. “But my head is a bit hard to get into right now.”
Meanwhile, World Athletics is making bullish noises about these championships being a spectacular return to prominence, after too many empty seats and ghostly silences greeted the Doha championships in 2019, and the mixed success of Eugene last year.
The sport’s president, Seb Coe, has even predicted a “championship for the ages”, which will be staged in a purpose-built 36,000 stadium on the banks of the Danube, with organisers claiming they have already sold over 300,000 tickets.
However, when it comes to stadiums, Hodgkinson has somewhere closer to her home in Salford in mind. Asked whether she would like to see her face at Old Trafford, like Toone, if she wins gold, she smiled. “That would be nice,” she replied. “That would be getting the same recognition, wouldn’t it?”
