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It has been just over a month since Keely Hodgkinson became the 800-metre Olympic champion at the Paris 2024 Olympics – and the running spikes have officially been kicked off as she joins our Zoom call from her London hotel room wearing a white dressing gown with her blonde hair pulled back by a hairband. The 22-year-old is fresh from a 90-minute spa treatment, and she deserves it.
“Paris was absolutely amazing for me. I loved all of it, even the nerves,” she beams. “I’ll be honest, I was crapping myself because I could feel the pressure. I knew there was a big expectation and obviously I didn’t want to disappoint. But also for myself, I just knew I could win, and I would have been so pissed off if I hadn’t done that. I was just really focused on the execution – getting through the rounds was the biggest part. I was more nervous for the heats than I was for the final.”
So what really happens when you win the Olympic gold medal you have been dreaming of your whole life? Plot spoiler: it’s not glamorous. You have to immediately wee in front of a stranger for drug testing. “I have had some where they literally kneel down to watch you because they have to make sure that you’re doing it properly,” Keely laughs.
Post oui oui, did Keely go out out to celebrate her win? “I’m still celebrating,” she admits. Meanwhile, her gold medal is taking some much-needed time out until Keely fulfils her long-term goal of having a bar in her house decorated with all her medals – including a silver from the Tokyo 2020 Summer Olympics, two European Championship golds and two World Championship silvers. “It’s in my kitchen in a box just chilling,” she says of her newest addition. “Because friends and family have been wanting to see it, I’ve got it out quite a bit. I need to wipe it down, because I’ve had lots of kids’ hands touching it, but once I’ve done that, I’ll probably put it away like I did with my Tokyo medal. Until I got back from Paris, I hadn’t looked at it for two and a half years.”
It’s just another accessory for Keely. After all, the medal was earned over many years – from taking up running at nine years old whilst growing up in her small home town of Atherton, near Manchester, all the way to the top of the podium. You might expect that Keely has always been the best at her sport, but when I ask her what she would tell her younger self if they could join us for our interview, it’s obvious it’s taken a lot of resilience to become a winner.
“I would say, just keep doing what you’re doing. You’re not the best at everything now, and that’s slowly going to change. The more you focus on your journey and allow things to happen in its own time, then great things will happen, and you’ll get exactly what you want. Just wait.”
“My dad was telling me recently that when I was 10, all I used to say was, ‘I want to be Olympic champion like Jess Ennis, I want to go to the Olympics.’ But growing up, I always felt like it was so far away,” she continues. “She [younger me] would be very shocked to know I was Olympic champion – because coming through the English schools and National Cross-Country, I wasn’t winning everything. I had silvers, I had bronzes. I made a couple of England teams, but I actually never ran for England on the track until I was about 16. It is important to remember when you’re young, you don’t have to be winning everything, you just need to keep on your track and keep focused. I do believe everybody’s time will come, whether that’s when you’re 17 or when you’re 29 or 34. Everybody’s time will come, I just believe that mine is now.”
Keely’s time has come thanks in part to her commitment to her wellbeing – she tells me she has been working with a sports psychiatrist since 2022. “Back then, it was more for me off the track than on,” she admits. “My emotions were all over the place. I was a bit low. I didn’t have amazing motivation. Personal development was probably a big factor, too, just growing up… we had three championships that year and it was mentally so draining. I wanted help getting out of that slump. They’re just good to also offload to, with everything going on, whether that’s personally, on or off the track. Sometimes you need someone to talk to who’s got nothing to do with your life and doesn’t know the people in it.”
The Paris Olympics gold medallist on her beauty and wellness secrets.
Chat like this from an athlete was unheard of until the likes of Simone Biles and Naomi Osaka started openly talking about how becoming a champion can bring huge mental strain. Becoming an Olympic champion takes intense mental work as well as the physical. “I always say to myself before a race, ‘It’s like now or never.’ I’d worked on it all year, just trying to lock into that mentality of nothing else other than gold. That has helped. I have good self-belief, but I felt like it could be better, and I felt like I could control that voice of doubt a bit more. Everybody has a voice of doubt – that’s not abnormal. The top athletes in the world will always have that little voice in their head, like everybody else. It’s just your reaction to it that makes the difference. I wanted to almost shut that up,” Keely says.
What does a gold medal mindset look like? “We would talk about things like, ‘What’s the difference between a medallist and a gold medallist mindset?’ A medallist may be happy with making the podium, whereas a gold medallist would be really pissed off with silver and bronze,” she replies. “A gold medallist wouldn’t be focused on what everybody else is doing, but a medallist might have some thoughts about what their opponents are up to, or who’s ahead and who’s behind. Someone who’s so confident in their gold medal mindset is only focused on themselves. For me, that seems to trick my brain a little bit into getting into that really confident mindset.”
Gathering this strength of mind is even more impressive when you consider Keely considers her run up to the Paris Olympics as one of the most testing – and retrospectively, empowering – times in her life. “To be honest, this whole year has actually not been easy at all,” she admits. “I got injured in November last year, which kept me out until the end of January. My whole plan was out the window. I was so unfit in January, I was getting battered by the girls in my [training] group. I’d be injured, then I’d be ill, then I’d start to run again, then I couldn’t run again, I wasn’t ready, then I’d get ill again. It felt like a never-ending cycle. I was so far off when I needed to be. But now that I look back, it was actually a huge blessing in disguise, because I was allowed to put together back-to-back training weeks. My endurance improved so much. I went from not being able to keep up with the 1,500 metre girls to running right alongside them – which I’ve never been able to do before. I got stronger in the gym. I was able to make all these gains, and that’s what the difference has been in terms of me running faster than I ever have before.”
2024 didn’t just see Keely make gains on the track – her winning moment marked the biggest TV ratings for the Olympics, with 9.1 million people tuning in on the BBC and BBC iPlayer. I highlight to her that this is a huge win for women’s sport, which has long struggled to get the viewership and the attention it deserves. “I haven’t thought of it like that,” she smiles. “I’m really proud to be part of track and field anyway, because I do feel like – compared to probably all sports – that we are the most equal sport that there is. I don’t really feel like there’s a pay difference. With track, if you perform well, you’ll get rewarded for that. It doesn’t matter what you look like or where you come from, which we love very much! But I think in Great Britain as a whole, the women are just doing great, from the sprinters to Kat (Katarina Johnson-Thompson) and Georgia Bell (Keely’s training partner), and Laura Muir and myself. It was just amazing to see that, and to have both men and women support us. It’s great to be at the forefront of that, and hopefully it inspires more girls and boys to take up track and field.”
Getting young girls to stay in sport is a tough task. According to a UNESCO study, 49% of adolescent girls drop out of sports during adolescence – with one in two young women quitting by the age of 13 and more than two-thirds leaving sport behind by the age of 17. Societal pressure to conform to a certain body standard is thought to be part of the reason. Keely herself wasn’t immune to these issues growing up.
“It definitely is a personal journey,” she shares. “It depends on what you believe growing up and the people around you growing up. I was really supported by my family. My dad, in particular, treated me and my brother the same growing up – and that’s helped with my self-confidence and not worrying what people think.
But don’t get me wrong, there were definitely periods of time in my childhood when I thought, ‘I don’t want to be the muscly friend or the young girl with muscles.’ Back then – maybe even now still – it’s not everybody’s cup of tea, but that’s OK… there’s somebody out there for everybody. Everyone has a preference, and that’s fine. But I don’t think girls should shy away from being that, if that’s going to help them be the best of their ability and do what they want. You’ve got to learn to love your body, and I certainly have. I love my body, it can do these great things. So if that means I need to do more upper body [exercises], then that’s fine.”
Despite the Olympics being the first time there was an equal number of male and female athletes competing in its history, there is a long way to go behind the scenes to achieve real gender parity in sport. It’s something Keely wants to campaign for. “I do have a bit more of a platform, and I would love to use it in the right way,” she says.
This is the second time I have interviewed Keely, and last August, I was taken aback by her candour when she discussed how she would like to see more research into how hormonal contraception affects sporting performance. “The contraception talk… it’s a topic that isn’t even touched on in athletics, but as a young woman you may be in a relationship, or you may be struggling with your periods and you want lighter ones, so you choose contraception,” she shared. “But they can also can have things like… you can gain weight, you can lose weight, change your mood, have mood swings, change your personality and then it’s like, as an athlete, I don’t really want to put something in my body that doesn’t belong there that is going to mess with the hormones – you don’t want your hormones impacting the performance. I don’t think men maybe realise what we have to go through with that type of thing and how it can affect our periods, our bodies and even our minds, and if everyone talks about it maybe we can find a generalised solution that can help move us forward.”
Keely is right – as female athletes battle to secure research into how the female body responds to high-level sport, and outdated research done on male athletes is used instead – there is next to no research on the topic. One study even states that ‘there is insufficient high-quality data to determine the effects of menstrual cycle phase and contraceptive pill use on athletic performance in female athletes.’
In a landmark study conducted this year, the BBC spoke to a number of elite British sportswomen and almost two-thirds said their performance was affected by their period, and a quarter said they saw a direct link between their menstrual cycle and injury. The likes of Leah Williamson and Beth Mead both tore their ACLs – an injury that has directly been linked to periods. So, with this being such a big worry for female athletes and many looking to contraception as a way to manage the risk, why isn’t there the research?
Despite plenty of female athletes speaking up in support of Keely, her comments were met with some misogynistic backlash. Comments included, “Don’t have sex until you’re ready for babies,” and “the solution is abstinence”. Helpful as always.
“It got some hate comments, didn’t it? I did see,” she says today, but that won’t stop her using her voice. “I still think it is important and no, I’m not asking men to go and fix all our problems. That’s not why I’m asking. I’m asking for more research into what are the effects [of contraception] on our body. We generally don’t know in sport – and in everyday life – and we’re trying to be a professional athlete on top of that! There are so many questions around it.”
Another issue Keely is keen to get more people talking about? “Women’s bodies post-baby. It’s still a relatively new thing in sport. For myself, and probably other women, when it comes to a time when you want to have kids and you want to return to sport, you just don’t know what effect that’s going to have. There’s not really a set recovery process. People are kind of guessing at the minute. For some people, it’s gone really, really well and they’ve been great – and they come back within a year. Some people, it’s taken two or three years. It would just be interesting if there was any better way of getting your body back to compete if there’s a burnout process, and how it affects your body.”
Keely reflects on how different that is for male athletes. “When it comes to reproduction, the male athletes really don’t have to stress about that – the wife just does the hard work and then they have a beautiful baby. Women don’t want to throw their careers away. I’m sure if you knew that you were in good hands, you knew what to do and how to look after your body to give it the best chance of coming back, that would be a bit more comforting in my mind. Or could companies [sponsors] not feel like they’re rushing that? I also understand the other perspective… when a company is paying you or sponsoring you, they’re paying for you to play, and [for] your results. I fully understand that, but I don’t think you can take that away for the reproduction of life.”
Aside from campaigning for change and going after the 800-metre world record – which has stood for 41 years – Keeley also has her sights set on bridging the gap between athletics and audiences. “We had such a great reception after the Olympics, and people love track and field, but they’ve no idea that we race every year and we have championships every year. If we can bridge the gap with my generation, make it accessible and get them wanting to watch it, that would be the start of something really great. It would get more eyes on it, get more people involved and people enjoying and actually appreciating athletics. I’d love to try and bridge that gap.”
That means securing visibility. “There needs to be more brands involved,” Keely says, having just worked with Rimmel and sat front row at Burberry’s London Fashion Week show. But with that comes the classic misogynistic comments that have been thrown at athletes like Emma Raducanu, who has been plagued with comments from people and pundits alike that say she is too distracted by brand endorsements. Keely is quick to defend the sporting sisterhood, and we love to see it.
“Emma, she was also so young when she did what she did. People forget how young she is, and how difficult it can be at that age. In tennis there’s so much money involved and so many eyes. I feel like the poor girl’s being judged every week. I think some people forget the facts. She had that incredible performance. She is a great athlete, but it might take her some time to figure out how to get that back – or working with the right people. People just get a little bit impatient, but I’m sure she will be great. And she still is an inspiration to a lot of girls who want to compete in sport. She’s still so young. She’s younger than me. She’s like 21!”
Keely, like Emma, is a history maker. Keely is only the tenth British woman to win an Olympic gold medal in athletics, following in the footsteps of fellow 800-metre Olympic champion Dame Kelly Holmes. Kelly will not only present Keely with her GLAMOUR Women of the Year award for Sporting Hero, but has become a huge support to her since they met – after Keely smashed Kelly’s national 800-metre record at Tokyo 2020. “She’s inspiring four generations at once, she’s still inspiring people to this day,” Keely fangirls. “She messages every now and then with support or words of advice – she’s always there. She said to just really enjoy it all. As an athlete, you constantly want to move on to the next thing – and she was like, ‘You really just need to embrace all of this. You’re the Olympic champion. No one can take that from you.’”
No they can’t, Keely! But rest-assured, everyone – even with all the talent in the world, Olympic champions still struggle to get back to the gym and training. “I’m ready to come back. I’ve got motivation, but it’s so hard coming back, man,” she admits. “That first month is honestly horrible. You just can’t walk for three weeks. There’s nothing more humbling than that. You go from being in the shape of your life, peak fitness, to literally rock bottom.”
And that’s the kind of realism that makes Keely Hodgkinson not just a Sporting Hero on the track, but one off it, too.
