After winning an Olympic 800m gold medal and the BBC’s Sports Personality of the Year award, Keely Hodgkinson set herself a bold new challenge: getting a whole new generation of fans into track and field.
The athletics’ record books will show that this was a day where the Olympic bronze medallist Georgia Hunter Bell held off Irish star Sarah Healy to win the women’s 1500m in 4min 0.65sec – while Lina Nielsen and Neil Gourley set British records in the women’s 300m and men’s 1,000m.
But the sight of hundreds of teenage and young girls dancing to Taylor Swift, Rosé and Bruno Mars, and Psy’s Gangnam Style in between races at her brand new event, the Keely Klassic, was quite the riposte.
“The gold medal has enabled me to put on events like this and to bring a new generation to the sport to enjoy watching it,” said Hodgkinson.
What made it even more remarkable still was that Hodgkinson, who was intending to go for the 800m short-track world record, was not competing having injured her hamstring during the week.
