Keely Hodgkinson and the 800m record set on the day she was born

Five days and four laps

On the Saturday in Birmingham, Hodgkinson ran 1:56.33 in a heat at the British Indoor Championships. There was no pacemaker to follow. At 400m she had 56.28 on the clock. She kept going until she had taken almost a second off her own British record. To anybody watching the final, it would have been easy to miss the fastest race of the weekend.

On Thursday in northern France she had a pacemaker and a particular time to chase. The first 200m went by in 26.83. At halfway, the clock showed 56.00. After all that work she was only 0.28 seconds ahead of where she had been in Birmingham.

Watch the third lap. She reached 600m in 1:25.05, more than a second ahead of her Birmingham split at the same point. She had a lead to carry through the last turn and a clock waiting at the end of the straight. She crossed in 1:54.87. A record that had lasted her entire life was gone by 0.95 seconds.

A result from Bolton

At nine, she had finished fourth in a Red Rose League race on her club’s home ground at Leigh Sports Village. On 15 December 2012, a ten-year-old Hodgkinson won the under-11 girls’ race at a Red Rose Cross Country League meeting in Bolton. The results sheet gives her club, Leigh Harriers, and her time, 7:11. Nineteen seconds later the next girl came through. That is about all the sheet tells you. Nobody recording those times needed to guess what either runner might become.

Three winters later she was racing for her school at Longford Park. Her club’s report describes a pack of eight early in the junior girls’ race. Hodgkinson stayed with them, raised the pace and had twenty metres to spare at the finish. The time was 13:42. Put that report beside the Liévin splits and you can pick out something familiar. Even then she could decide where a race was going to get difficult for the people following her.

There are less glamorous days in the archive, too. At the 2017 English Schools cross country in Norwich, she finished sixth for Greater Manchester. Her 12:39 at the Norfolk Showground was 21 seconds behind the winner. A year later in Leeds she finished second. Look at both sheets and you can see a young runner learning how to race in a crowd long before anyone expected a world record of her.

Back for the relay

Just over four weeks after Liévin came the world indoor championships in Toruń. On 22 March, the same evening her training partner Georgia Hunter Bell won the 1500m, Hodgkinson took the 800m title in 1:55.30. She was the first British woman to win that event at a world indoor championships. Then somebody needed her for the relay.

Less than an hour later she was back to anchor Britain’s 4×400m team. They finished fifth in 3:28.09. British Athletics credited her with a 50.1-second leg, the quickest in the final. Ask what Hodgkinson ran that Sunday and most people would quite reasonably give you the winning time. Her three teammates had another answer.