Keely Hodgkinson sets target of four major championship medals in 2022

Keely Hodgkinson has warned her opponents that the World Indoors is not enough as she sets her sights on four major championship medals in 2022. The 20-year-old is a big James Bond fan and celebrated winning Olympic silver in Tokyo by attending the premier of No Time To Die and being invited by Aston Martin to drive the DB5 car used in the film.

Having trained hard over the winter, Hodgkinson says she is ready to kick on again by winning her first global gold medal at the world indoors in Belgrade this weekend. But she also believes she can follow it up with medals this summer at the world outdoors in Eugene, Oregon, the Commonwealth Games in Birmingham and, potentially, the European championships in Munich.

“I’d love four major medals,” she says. “It’s definitely physically possible to do all four. Mentally, we’ll see.” The world outdoors is No 1 and I really want to do the Commonwealths, as it is a home Games. With the Europeans we’ll see how the body and mind are coping. But I’d like to be there.”

Last year, Hodgkinson announced herself to the world by taking the European indoor title and then running a British outdoor record of 1min 55.88sec to win Olympic silver. To keep her focus fresh for 2022, she wrote down a long list of the targets. The first was to break the British indoor 800m record, which she did by running 1:57.20 in Birmingham last month – the fastest time by a woman indoors for 20 years. The next was to win the world indoors. But that, she says, only hints at the scale of her ambition.

“I did write down ‘world champion’, so that is an expectation for me,” she says. “Hopefully, I can go back and tick it off when I get home. I’ve set some goals but they’re pretty big – they are bigger than last year.”

Som