Exclusive:
Keely Hodgkinson will be going for gold at the Olympics in Paris next month – and she’s already planned how she’ll celebrate if she makes it to the top of the podium
When Keely Hodgkinson smashed the 25-year-old British 800m record to secure silver at the 2020 Olympics in Tokyo, the shock was etched across her face.
Just 19, she seemed to have the athletics world at her feet. But then came the crash, as her success plunged her into depression. How could she ever hit such heights again, she began thinking.
Well, after successive World silvers, winning gold in Paris this summer could be the answer. And the 22-year-old has already planned how she would celebrate taking the title – by buying her dream car, a beige Porsche.
Keely almost quit athletics aged 15 but was cajoled back on to the track by her dad Dean, and the promise of a new pair of snazzy shoes. And the Wigan-born track star admits she found the aftermath of her Tokyo breakthrough tough to deal with.
She says: “I didn’t realise how much the Olympic comedown was actually really a big thing. The best way I can explain it would be I was 19, I had such a big high. Did I think it was going to happen at 19? Absolutely not. But it just kind of did.
“But I feel like that gave me such a high that when I came down from that, it was almost like a lot of the other things that you used to get a high from, whether that be like going out with your friends or this and that, just weren’t that high any more.
“And I just felt like I was always just low and sad, and I would actually say I did hit a stage of depression at some point. And I just was like, ‘But why do I feel sad, I’ve nothing to feel sad about?’ So that was like a struggle. I couldn’t really get any sort of high from anything else.”
Keely says at first it was only her mum Rachel who really understood the emotions she was going through, while she kept her friends in the dark about them.
She explains: “I was in a very different situation to them. I didn’t really talk to them about it to be honest, because how much would they understand? Probably not that much.
“Whereas my mum was like, ‘No, I totally get how you’re feeling, like you might feel guilty for feeling sad’. She just spoke to me on FaceTime a lot, because I lived in Leeds at the time, and my parents are from Manchester. So we just took our time and I think she just listened to me.”
As well as being supported by her loved ones, Keely, who is “half deaf” in her left ear after having a tumour removed in 2015, turned to a psychologist and took up the piano to help lift her spirits.
“It became all about the little things and spending time with family and really appreciating being at home, and then eventually I came around,” she tells the latest High Performance podcast.
“It was just finding again the pleasures in the small things and taking it day by day. Whether that was literally getting out of bed, and making your bed in the morning was like a progress. I just couldn’t look too far ahead. It was literally one day at a time, find little hobbies that I like to do. So like I now learn to play the piano as a nice little peaceful thing.
“I found joy in the small things and I wanted to feel like it wasn’t a chore to go to training, it was a pleasurable thing. I actually started working with my psychologist first for me off the track. I was more struggling off the track [more] than I was on. But now I’m trying to get into that gold medal mindset.”
Keely’s path to Olympic glory grew a little less fraught last week when reigning champion Athing Mu tripped in the US trials and failed to qualify. But she might not have been on the starting line in Paris had it not been for her dad’s intervention before a schools’ race aged 15.
The two-time European champion says: “I was just cacking myself. My dad actually bribed me! He was like, ‘If you do it, I’ll take you to Selfridges and get you a pair of shoes’. And I won by like 0.01 (seconds). But I’m adamant that if he hadn’t have made me do that race, I think I would have just quit.”
As for her next piece of post-race retail therapy, Keely admits: “It’s going to sound so materialistic, I was like, ‘If I get the gold it’s a nice payday, and I will buy myself a new car’. I wanted a Porsche, in this really nice beige. It’s just hot.”
- The full interview will be available on the High Performance podcast this week.
