“I love that championships are a big showdown,” says Keely Hodgkinson, with all the energy you’d expect from one of the fastest women on the planet. At 21 years old, the exuberant 800-metre runner from Wigan is already an Olympic silver medallist, a three-time British record-breaker and ranked global number one for her distance.
But her focus, right now, is the World Athletics Championships in Budapest this summer, where she’ll take on her rival, American Athing Mu, in a highly anticipated battle for gold. “We don’t race each other very often,” she says, chatting from her apartment in Salford. “So when we do it’s this big deal.”
Hodgkinson might be known for her killer instinct on the track, but out of her Nike running shoes this new It girl of athletics is all about fun. Filling her downtime with spa breaks, Dubai trips and dinners with friends in Greater Manchester, where she moved last year, her Instagram’s awash with Prada and Off-White outfit pictures. “I like playing around with fashion and dressing up,” she says, “even if I’m only out until 11pm because I’ve got training the next day.”
Below, she share’s some of her favourite things with Vogue.
Puerto José Banús, more commonly known as Puerto Banús is a marina to the west of Marbella, Spain on the Costa del Sol.John Harper
