The applause for Keely Hodgkinson used to be nonetheless reverberating round Media Town on Tuesday when this 12 months’s BBC Sports activities Persona of the 12 months started to stare carefully on the earlier winners carved into the trophy. “I started to read the names and you realise it is history right in front of you: Bobby Moore, Mary Rand, Linford Christie, it goes all the way back to 1954,” she stated.
However one element, greater than the rest, stood out. The Olympic 800m champion’s victory used to be a record-breaking fourth in a row for a girl, following tennis participant Emma Raducanu in 2021 and the footballers Beth Mead and Mary Earps in 2022 and 2023 respectively. “It shows that women’s sport in the UK is in a good place, really strong in quite a lot of areas,” Hodgkinson stated.
It’s definitely a a ways cry from a determined stretch between 2007 and 2020 when a male athlete now not most effective lifted the award annually, however most effective 5 ladies – the swimmer Rebecca Adlington, the athletes Jessica Ennis-Hill, Jo Pavey and Dina Asher-Smith and the jockey Hollie Doyle – made the rostrum.
On the other hand, don’t be shocked if this run continues in 2025, particularly with England protecting their Girls’s Euros name and the Girls’s Rugby International Cup hung on house soil. What worth rugby’s Ellie Kildunne being on subsequent 12 months’s shortlist?
Don’t depend out Hodgkinson being a repeat winner both. She celebrated her Spoty victory with not anything more potent than a water on the aftershow birthday celebration as she knew she used to be going through a difficult coaching consultation on Wednesday. For her, Paris used to be simply the launchpad for her ambitions.
It used to be telling that once her victory, the president of International Athletics, Sebastian Coe, lauded her within the perfect imaginable phrases. “I’d be hard pushed to place any female British athlete significantly above her in the history of our sport in the last 50 years,” he stated. “You don’t win the Europeans and an Olympics and effectively smash a national record without being a legend.”
Intriguingly, Hodgkinson does now not totally trust his evaluation. “I still think there is so much to do,” she stated. “There are so many milestones to hit. How many titles can you get, how many medals can you win? I don’t know what the record is for Britain. I just want to keep building on what I’ve already done.
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Keely Hodgkinson delights in winning BBC Sports Personality of the Year 2024 award – video
Another sign of her growing status is that in February she will have a new athletics event named after her – the Keely Klassic. It could start with a bang as she intends to break the indoor 800m world record in Birmingham. In a neat act of symmetry that record of 1 min 55.82sec was set by Jolanda Ceplak of Slovenia on 3 March 2002, the day Hodgkinson was born.
“Track over the years has got a bit lost with all the football in this country,” she says. “So we are trying to bring more eyes to track and field, especially my generation. Hopefully it will be a really fun event. I have big ambitions with it. We just hope the public like it as well.
I love to inspire people, whether it’s to watch it, try it, get them off the couch for their mental health. It’s a great opportunity for that.”
If someone has a possibility of flipping folks’s perceptions of athletics it’s Hodgkinson, who has the skill and character to burrow even deeper into the mainstream. In a while after stepping off the Spoty degree, for example, she published her telephone alarm had long gone off simply because the winners have been being introduced.
“It was really embarrassing,” she stated, guffawing, earlier than explaining she units an alarm for 9pm on a daily basis to remind her to replace her whereabouts for drug testers and forgot to show it off.
Hodgkinson could also be disarmingly truthful about how lifestyles isn’t all the time rosy when you’re looking to be the most efficient on this planet. “Everyone has moments of weakness,” she stated. “I’m not going to pretend I don’t have any. Last week I was upset mid-session because it was so hard and I was so tired. You’ve got to really dig deep on those days. But I have learned to take it week by week and goal by goal.”
Regardless of how difficult it will get her coaches, Trevor Meadows and Jenny Painter – who gained the BBC’s training award on Tuesday – say that the values of arduous paintings and a want to win, instilled via her oldsters, Dean and Rachel, all the time shine via.
“What we have learned about Keely is that she knows when it is time to knuckle down and she is never going to lose that drive and determination,” stated Meadows, a former Workforce GB middle-distance mainstay. “She wants to be a legend of the sport and she wants to win again in LA. I think only when she has won another gold medal will she look back and think: ‘Ah, I’ve done well.’”
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Feminine winners in a row of Sports activities Persona of the 12 months – a brand new checklist – after Keely Hodgkinson scooped the highest prize on Tuesday. Emma Raducanu started the streak along with her fantastic US Open victory in 2021, Beth Mead gained a 12 months later after England’s triumph within the Girls’s Euros and goalkeeper Mary Earps adopted in 2023 when the Lionesses made it to the International Cup ultimate.
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Feminine winners of Spoty since its inception in 1954. Males have gained it 54 occasions, with only one combined award – Jayne Torvill and Christopher Dean in 1984. England tops the checklist of winners via nationality with 55, Scotland are subsequent with seven, together with Andy Murray’s 3 victories that put him most sensible of the person checklist, Wales have 5, Northern Eire two and the Isle of Guy one – Mark Cavendish in 2011.
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Maximum feminine winners in a row earlier than this 12 months: the swimmer Anita Lonsbrough in 1962, adopted via the athletes Dorothy Hyman in 1963 and Mary Rand in 1964. The closing time there have been back-to-back feminine winners earlier than the present streak used to be 1971 and 1972 when Mary Peters adopted Princess Anne, whose daughter Zara Phillips went directly to win the award herself in 2006.
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Spoty winners from the sector of athletics, via a ways probably the most victories via any recreation within the award’s 71 editions. System one is subsequent with 8 (Stirling Moss and Jackie Stewart as soon as each and every, Nigel Mansell, Damon Hill and Lewis Hamilton two times each and every), adopted via soccer and tennis (seven each and every) and cricket, boxing and biking (5).