Britain equals best-ever medal tally at World Athletics Championships as Atherton’s Keely Hodgkinson wins silver
With the 2023 World Athletics Championships having finished this weekend, Great Britain managed to equal their best-ever tally at the competition, with local athlete Keely Hodgkinson helping the team bring home 10 medals overall. A huge effort all around.
The last time the nation took home this much silverware was three decades ago at the 1993 Worlds in Stuttgart, but thanks to the efforts of the Manc middle-distance runner, as well as the likes of the 4x400m men’s and women’s relay teams took home, it was a healthy haul.
Bagging a total of two gold, three silver and five bronzes, Great Britain and Ireland athletes placed in three different events in what turned out to be a successful final night in Budapest.
Brilliant stuff.
The standout story for us, of course, was seeing Wigan‘s Keely Hodgkinson notch yet another silver medal, her third in just two world championships and an Olympics that have taken place in the last two years — all at the age of just 21.
Just over a year on from finishing second in the 800m over in the US, the Atherton-born athlete notched yet another silver medal at the World Championships, her fifth in the last three years and while she admitted she did think she was going to be able to “come up the inside” and win it and is obviously gutted to just miss out gold again, she still believes “it’s only a matter of time“.
Here’s how she pulled off her latest feat, nipping ahead within the last final split seconds.
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Speaking to reporters after, she said she felt like she “didn’t put a foot wrong” and was simply pipped to the post by the quicker runner on the day, just narrowly missing out to Kenya’s Mary Moraa who took first place.
Meanwhile, she still clocked in at one minute and 56.34 seconds, finishing ahead of the previous champion Athing Mu (who beat her to the gold at Tokyo 2020) in third and GB teammate Jemma Reekie in fifth. Not too shabby whatsoever and we’re sure that gold will come soon enough.
And even still, we also thoroughly enjoyed the fact that she went a bit viral last week after summing up pretty much every British person every summer since the dawn of time.
You’ll get ’em next time, Keely — and hopefully, it’ll be less muggy.
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Featured Image — British Athletics (via Twitter)/Keely Hodgkinson (via Instagram)