Keely Hodgkinson reveals rare split hamstring after defeat to Audrey Werro
Keely Hodgkinson has revealed she is running on rare anatomy: a split hamstring that gives her two tendons instead of one.
The Olympic 800m champion explained in interviews published on 17 September that an MRI scan, taken after a suspected tear last year, uncovered the abnormality BBC Sport. She still ran. She still won. Then the body asked more questions.
Hodgkinson finished second to Audrey Werro in the 800m final at the World Athletics Ultimate Championship in Budapest in September. It was her third outdoor defeat by the Swiss runner this summer, including the loss of her European crown in Birmingham.
The Birmingham injury was severe. Hodgkinson suffered a 4.5cm hamstring tear minutes before she was due to enter the call room, the holding area where athletes check in before a final Athletics Weekly. She said she sustained another tear at those European Championships, only a few weeks before Budapest.
That scan history changed how she understood the damage. Hodgkinson said her body is "quite literally built differently" because the tendon is split. When one side tore, she explained, she still had another tendon intact because of the split.
Her luck off the track was no better. Hodgkinson said she fell while jogging along a canal during a warm-down, cutting both knees and suffering whiplash-like jarring in her back The Telegraph. A warm-down is the easy jogging athletes do after a hard effort to loosen the legs.
The context makes the Budapest silver more striking. Hodgkinson won Olympic gold in Paris in 2024. She set a new indoor 800m world record in February 2026, then won gold at the World Indoor Championships a month later.
She said she has not missed any training in the last three weeks, but she has altered her approach. Speed training, the flat-out sprint repetitions that carry the most hamstring risk, has been reduced.
The hamstring injury at the European Championships ruled her out of Diamond League meets in Zurich and Brussels, the elite city-by-city circuit where the best meet through the summer. She will end her 2026 season at the all-female Athlos event in London.
What makes this stand out is the simple maths of sprinting. The hamstring, the powerful muscle group at the back of the thigh, drives each stride. To race the world's best 800m runners with a fresh tear, a fall behind you and an altered preparation is not normal resilience. It is extraordinary problem-solving at speed.
