Coach Trevor Painter vividly remembers the moment he first laid eyes on Keely Hodgkinson as an athlete. “Terrible,” is his unexpected recall of that encounter.
In defence of the Olympic 800m champion, her audition to her future coach took place in the shot put circle at a school event.
“I reminded her of it the other day,” says Painter a decade on, “and she also remembers being truly terrible at the shot put.”
Aided in part by their pair’s close geographical proximity – the Hodgkinson family home is just seven miles from that of Painter – but also by his success in coaching his own wife, Jenny Meadows, in the same discipline, they united for what has become a hugely successful triumvirate.
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Read More“Keely’s mum reached out to Jenny for a bit of advice first and then things kept growing from there,” he recalled.
Until this weekend, that trio have been in Potchefstroom, South Africa, for a winter training camp for Painter and Meadows’s M11 Track Club, only returning home for what feels like Hodgkinson’s crowning glory at the BBC Sports Personality of the Year in Salford on Tuesday night.
She is currently the odds-on favourite to be a fourth straight female winner of the end-of-year honour and emulate one of her heroes in Dame Kelly Holmes 20 years after picking up the same gong.
It would cap off a near-perfect season for the 22-year-old, who as well as being crowned Olympic champion won European gold when ill and also broke the British record with the sixth fastest time in history for two laps of the track.
Prior to 2024, she had been the bridesmaid of the distance, winning the silver medal at the last Olympics in Tokyo and painfully repeating the feat at the subsequent two World Championships.
Keely Hodgkinson with coach Trevor Painter in South Africa (Photo: Getty)Of those, the Worlds in Budapest in 2023 was the toughest pill to swallow when seen as the event favourite. “She was disappointed in Budapest as we all thought she was ready for the gold,” recalled Painter.
“She made a slight mistake on the first lap and it was always difficult from there. It’s fine margins in this like all sports and she was really disappointed but we all built her back up.”
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Read MoreHe and Meadows have built her up to the point that she seemed invincible last season, and the trio’s relationship is clearly key to getting her to that point.
“Keely refers to it as another set of parents she has,” said her affable coach. “She has parents at home and parents at the track. She’ll bounce off both Jenny and me from time to time – it depends what mood she’s in.
“Sometimes if she’s upset she’ll go to Jenny for a deep conversation and sometimes me. She’s very comfortable with both of us, we’ve got a great understanding of each other as individuals and we’re all trying to get the best out of her and push her to do that.”
Pushing Hodgkinson to get to the top of her sport off the back of a trio of silver medals has been aided by her work ethic.
The M11 group in Manchester like to set a parameter for a session – say 30 to 40 minutes – and athletes are given a choice of how much they want to do. “She always goes to the latter end of those bigger numbers,” said Painter, which he says is one of her greatest strengths. The other? “It’s just her composure under pressure when the going gets tough.”
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Read MorePainter likes to think his coaching philosophy and approach have not changed massively since overseeing his wife’s career. The one difference is that Meadows’s time as an athlete was blighted by a litany of drug cheats later exposed, which she estimates costs her in the region of quarter-of-a-million pounds in lost prize money not to mention potential medals.
“Jenny had a lot of struggle with drug cheats and she could have been a lot more successful than she was,” he said. “I feel now with Keely she’s getting the rewards we could have had when Jenny was running. They work very similarly but thankfully the landscape’s a lot cleaner now in this sport.”
Ominously for her rivals, Painter points out that Hodgkinson is far from the finished article in her discipline, an Olympic champion 12 years younger than when Holmes achieved the feat at the Athens Olympics in 2004.
And he argues that, like Holmes, she could double up over the 800m and 1500m, his star athlete slowly warming to the idea of that with each passing season.
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