Great Britain’s Keely Hodgkinson won gold in the 800m at the European Championships in Rome, retaining the title she won two years ago in Munich.
The 22-year-old medal hope for the Paris 2024 Olympics won in a time of 1:58.65, beating Slovakia’s Gabriela Gajanova, who finished strongly to take the silver, and France’s Anais Bourgoin in third.
Hodgkinson led the race throughout, holding off her rivals, despite not feeling 100 per cent coming into Wednesday’s final.
“I picked up an illness a little bit yesterday,” she told the BBC. “Sometimes you’ve just got to find a way to win.
“I wanted to go out and get a good time today but I’m happy with the win. I think I would’ve been disappointed if I didn’t try.”
Hodgkinson’s gold lifted Great Britain into third in the medal table on the final night of action at the six-day championships.
It is her second major title following her triumph in Munich two years ago, while she has two World Championships silver medals and another from the Tokyo Olympics in 2021, when she was just 19.
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Keely Hodgkinson says she wants to turn her silver medal from Tokyo into gold in Paris and will be ‘fearless’ in her approach as she looks to make it happen.
Hodgkinson’s personal best in the 800m currently stands at 10th fastest on the all-time list at 1:55:19 seconds, making her a major medal hope in Paris this summer.
Speaking to Sky Sports ahead of the Games, Hodgkinson said: “When people think about the day of an Olympic final it can be very stressful. You know ‘oh god, I’ve worked this entire year for two minutes to get it right’.
“But I think one of my pros is I look forward to it so much that I don’t even think about getting it wrong.
“I’ll sit down and say to myself ‘well, I’ve raced these girls a million times’, and I almost don’t think about it being this big Olympic final.
“It’s just two laps of a track that I’ve done many, many times.”
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