Keely Hodgkinson ready to risk upsetting athletics icon to chase next goal!

After an incredible year in athletics, capped off by picking up the top award at the BBC’s annual sporting ceremony on Tuesday night, Hodgkinson says she has really ‘stepped up this year,’ and is now the leader of the pack in athletics with a ‘target on her back,’ as others look to catch up with her.

“I feel like there's always the route of getting to the top, but now it's like, how do you stay there? I think that's the next challenge.” she said. “Now I'm the one with my target on the back of ‘Can I maintain it?’ And that's another mental threshold that I'm probably going to go through and I'll work on with my coaches.”

Now running at an elite level, Hodgkinson admits training with the best runners in the world can make an off day on the track feel even worse when you’re not performing to the best of your ability.

“I have such an incredible training group to train with. When you're training with the world's best like that, when you have a bad day, it makes you look 10 times worse!” she said. “We’ve all got our own strengths and weaknesses, and we're all training together, and you have to focus on your own journey.”

Speaking on the Sports Agents podcast, Hodgkinson also ruled out competing in four-time Olympic champion Johnson’s inaugural Grand Slam Track event next year, admitting the competition won’t help her reach her goal of becoming the fastest ever woman over two laps.

“I think what he's doing is really great,” she said. “He's trying to get more eyes to the sport, and I think that's not a bad thing at all, and I’m definitely interested in doing like one, but I didn’t want to sign up for the whole thing.

“I feel like for me, and the way I train and where I'm at, doing an 800m and a 1500m four times a year, at the times of year that they are… I've put out there that I'd really like to chase the women's world record, and for the way I train right now, I don't think that's going to help me get there.”

As Hodgkinson added, she only started to believe that breaking the women’s 800m world record – which has been held by Czech athlete Jarmila Kratochvilova since 1983 – was possible this year after ‘working really hard.’

“This world record has stood for, I think it’s what, 41 years now this year,” she said? “It's an absolutely incredible record that is, like I say, nobody's gotten near it in a long time. And I feel like only this year did I really believe that we actually could. I worked really hard, I got myself in really good shape, and I was starting to see that, ‘Okay I think we can actually get in the 1:53s and challenge this record!”

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