LONDON — Keely Hodgkinson has spent two years saying the oldest record in track and field is hers to take. With the Diamond League heading back to the London Stadium on 18 July, the Olympic 800m champion is no longer ruling out the idea that she could take it in front of a home crowd.
Speaking with 50 days to go until the meeting, Hodgkinson would not promise an assault on Jarmila Kratochvilova’s outdoor world record of 1:53.28, a mark that has stood since July 1983 and remains the longest running individual world record in the sport. She made clear, though, that she wants the moment to come in Britain if it comes at all. “Obviously I would love that to happen on home soil,” she said.
She arrives at this point of the season already rewritten into the record books once this year. In February she broke the world indoor 800m mark in Liévin, France, running 1:54.87 to take almost a full second off Jolanda Ceplak’s time, a record that had stood since 3 March 2002, the day Hodgkinson was born. World Athletics ranked the run as the 15th fastest 800m ever recorded in any conditions, and it sat just 0.26 seconds outside her own outdoor best.
A month later she added the global title that had eluded her, winning 800m gold at the World Athletics Indoor Championships in Toruń, Poland, in a championship record of 1:55.30. The double left her, alongside triple jumper Jonathan Edwards, as the only British athlete currently holding a world record in a championship event.
The outdoor target is a different animal. Kratochvilova’s 1:53.28, set more than four decades ago, is roughly 1.3 seconds quicker than Hodgkinson’s British record of 1:54.61, the time she clocked at the London Diamond League in July 2024 just weeks before winning Olympic gold in Paris. Closing that gap over two laps is a vast ask, and Hodgkinson has said it would need a perfect storm of conditions, pace and fitness to fall on the right day.
She also sounded comfortable letting the calendar decide. Hodgkinson said any move on the record would be made together with her coaches, Trevor Painter and Jenny Meadows, rather than forced onto a single date. “I think we have a plan of what we would like to happen,” she said, while acknowledging that the season tends to write its own script.
What has changed, by her own account, is her body. After a 2025 wrecked by two hamstring injuries that cost her a planned attempt at the record and left her settling for World Championship bronze in Tokyo, she has described this as the healthiest winter of her career. The Guardian reported that she feels closer than ever to Kratochvilova’s number, and she told BBC Sport this was the closest she has felt to it.
The London meeting gives her a natural stage. The London Stadium has sold out three years running, and the women’s 800m has become one of the night’s marquee events, in no small part because of her. Hodgkinson set her national record there in 2024, and she has spoken often about how the noise of a British crowd lifts her. “I get really excited about London,” she said.
There is history wrapped around the record she is chasing, and not all of it is comfortable. Kratochvilova’s era has long drawn suspicion, with some questioning whether her performances were clean, accusations the Czech runner has consistently denied and which have never been proven. The longevity of her 800m mark has kept those debates alive and turned it into a symbol of the sport’s broader anti-doping reckoning. For Hodgkinson, erasing it would carry weight beyond the stopwatch.
She has framed the prize in plain terms. Breaking the outdoor record, she has said, would settle the argument about her place in the event’s history once and for all. She believes it is possible, and she has been ticking off the markers that suggest she is right.
For now the calculation is about timing. The wider Diamond League circuit runs through the summer toward the global championships, and London is one of several chances rather than the only one. Hodgkinson left the door open to the record arriving earlier or later than the London date, depending on her shape. “That could just be how it goes,” she said.
What is not in doubt is the appetite. Hodgkinson has built her year around running faster rather than simply winning, and the indoor record was a statement that the outdoor one is within range. Whether 18 July proves to be the day or merely another step toward it, the London Stadium is bracing for the possibility that the longest standing record in athletics could fall to a 24-year-old from Atherton in front of her own people.
