Where does she find her drive? “My continuous silvers,” she deadpans. “Gold is all I have in my head right now. To get the gold in Paris. For me, that was the one I was always aiming for anyway.”
Hodgkinson prepares for a race rather as she does for a night out. “The process starts two hours beforehand – I just enjoy it,” she says. “There’s nothing really to do on race day, especially if I’m racing at 10pm.” A shower, fake tan, and then music playing as she does her hair and make-up and Hodgkinson is ready for the track. When do the nerves kick in? “I’m really good with nerves actually,” she says, in true freaki sh form.
She does, however, get excited about a race, visualising the different scenarios she and Painter have discussed: “Let others dictate your race and that’s when silly mistakes happen; panic after getting boxed in and you can bolt too early.”
She pauses. “If you want to watch a bad race, watch Lausanne [in June last year Hodgkinson found herself boxed in and then out-thought and out-paced by Kenyan Mary Moraa in the 800m]. That was bad,” she says coolly of her silver-medal run. And at the World Championships at Budapest in 2023 she hit a lactic wall with 300m to go.
“The pack was so fast through the first lap. It really made us all hurt. We’d never done it that fast before.” On that occasion it was her main rival, Athing Mu – the US talent who took gold in Tokyo – who set the pace with Hodgkinson as runner-up. “She wanted to make it hard,” says Hodgkinson.
While she gets on with the other girls – especially at the four annual Team GB training camps in South Africa – Hodgkinson is under no illusions. “On race day it’s game faces on,” she says.
Hodgkinson tells me she can measure the passage of time in her body and admits she is curious to know how her body will feel as she gets older. Right now, though, she’s enjoying seeing how far she can push herself. “I’d be lying if I said I don’t enjoy being good at it,” she says. “When I was younger I used to love seeing how much pain I could put myself in, which sounds a bit crazy, but you do have to be crazy to do this event.”
