'We just said' - What I told Keely Hodgkinson before she won Olympic gold

Keely Hodgkinson was the golden girl of the Summer Olympics - but it could have ‘gone better’, according to her coach.

Hodgkinson became Great Britain’s first athlete since Mo Farah in 2016 to claim a gold on the track, an achievement which earned her widespread acclaim and made her favourite for the 2024 BBC Sports Personality of the Year next month.

But her coach, Trevor Painter, now admits it could have been even more emphatic had she matched her times leading up to the Games.

At the London Diamond League Athletics Meet, Hodgkinson - from Atherton, Greater Manchester - set a British record of 1:54.61, becoming the sixth fastest-ever woman over the distance. And speaking at Sportcity in Manchester, Painter said: “Paris, on paper, went well - but it could have gone better.

“We wanted to run fast in London like she did because that would put a marker down and everyone would say, ‘Oh, well, she’s going to win. We’re not going to run that sort of time.’

“So that gave us confidence and put everyone else under pressure. We knew going into Paris it was just ‘get the job done.’

“After the semi-final, she said, ‘I want to put on a show tomorrow in the final.’ And we said, ‘Let’s just win the gold - don’t put on a show.’”

Until last summer, Hodgkinson was a three-time silver medallist - at the Tokyo Olympics in 2021 and two World Championships, in Eugene in 2022 and Budapest in 2023.

Painter - who is married to and coaches with retired British Olympian and 800m runner Jenny Meadows - said: “Every race this year if anyone has run 56 seconds for the first lap, they’ve not gone under 60 [seconds] for the second.

“So that was a big thing for us because we knew she could run 56 [seconds] and then on the second lap, she could run