Keely Hodgkinson: The track superstar with the world at her feet

Keely Hodgkinson’s path to stardom began young and is likely to have many more golden moments to come.

The 22-year-old followed up her brilliant Olympic title over 800 metres in Paris this summer by winning the BBC Sports Personality of the Year award on Tuesday evening.

Hodgkinson’s display of dominance in the Stade de France was the most watched event of the Games on terrestrial television and she similarly led from the front to become the fourth female winner in a row of the coveted BBC gong.

This was the year when the athlete from Atherton in Greater Manchester established herself as the best in the world in her event against a strong field.

Hodgkinson won all nine of her 800m races this year and her time of one minute 54.61 seconds, run at the Diamond League meeting in London in July, made her the sixth fastest woman in history.

Her athletic talent was obvious from an early age, with Hodgkinson joining Leigh Harriers at the age of nine and, inspired by Jessica Ennis-Hill’s Olympic heptathlon victory in 2012, soon winning races in her local area.

Aged 16, she became the European under-18 champion, while at 17 she won her first national senior title at the British Indoor Championships.

She added the outdoor title later in 2020, then the following year Hodgkinson broke into the mainstream with a string of prodigious performances.

First she broke two minutes for the first time to set an under-20 world record, the first by a British woman in 36 years, before becoming European indoor champion.

Hodgkinson was the youngest ever winner of the 800m at the event in Poland, which marked her senior international debut.

That summer she made her Olympic bow and won the silver medal, the look of shock on her face one of the images of the Games.

Still a teenager, Hodgkinson’s time of 1min 55.88secs broke Dame Kelly Holmes’ British record.

While that silver was a triumph, it became a colour of frustration for Hodgkinson.

She finished runner-up at the World Championships in 2022 and 2023, as well as the 2022 Commonwealth Games, with her rivals Athing Mu and Mary Moraa conspiring to keep her off the top step of the podium.

She remained unbeatable at European level both indoors and outdoors, but she made no secret that gold in Paris was the one she wanted.

That Hodgkinson not only coped with the tag of favourite but embraced it, stamping her authority on the race from first step to last, marked her out as one of Britain’s very best.

And Hodgkinson is still in the early stages of her career, with many more history-making opportunities to come.

Next year she will try to make it third time lucky at the World Championships, while she has also targeted breaking Jarmila Kratochvilova’s world record, which has stood since 1983.