PARIS — Olympic champion Keely Hodgkinson broke the women’s indoor 800m world record at the meet in Lievin, France, with a time of 1 min 54.87sec.
Hodgkinson shaved almost a second off the mark set by Slovenia’s Jolanda Ceplak of 1 min 55.82 sec on March 3, 2002 — the day of Hodgkinson’s birth.
“Thank God. That was really fun, I was really looking forward to this,” Hodgkinson said according to AFP.
The 23-year-old had clocked 1:56.33, without a pacemaker or the assistance of pace-setting lights at the edge of the track — the third-fastest time in the history of the British Athletics Championships.
Before the British Championships, she had not competed indoors for nearly three years. She had set her sights on breaking the record last winter but had to give up due to a knee injury.
She was then hampered by hamstring injuries at the start of the summer and had to settle for bronze at the World Championships in Tokyo in September.
Elsewhere, American athletics prodigy Cooper Lutkenhaus broke the world junior indoor 800-metres record with a victory in 1min 44.03secs at the Sound Running meet in Winston-Salem, North Carolina.
The 17-year-old Texan won the invitational event by 0.70 of a second over Penn State’s Handal Roban to become the sixth-fastest athlete indoors in 800m history.
Lutkenhaus erased the under-20 world record of 1:44.35 set in January 2000 by Russian Yuriy Borzakovskiy, who won 800m Olympic gold in 2004 at Athens.
Lutkenhaus was a stunning runner-up at last year’s American championships at Eugene, Oregon, to earn a berth in the 2025 World Championships at Tokyo.
Also in the Winston-Salem meet, Paris Olympic 1,500m champion Cole Hocker won the mile in 3:45.94 with fellow American Cooper Teare second in 3:50.49.
Hocker clocked the second fastest world indoor mile time in history behind the world record of 3:45.14 set by Norway’s Jakob Ingebrigtsen last February in France.
