Great Britain’s Keely Hodgkinson was a late entrant into the Vienna Indoor Track & Field meeting on Saturday (30) and the 18-year-old was fully vindicated in her decision to make a last minute dash to the Austrian capital.
Hodgkinson was already familiar with the Dusika Stadium after setting a European indoor U20 record of 2:01.16 last year but the teenager not only improved that mark in her last year as a junior but also decimated the world indoor U20 record with 1:59.03 in her first race of the season.
This was Hodgkinson’s first ever sub-two minute clocking and the reigning European U18 champion also became the first junior in history to eclipse the two minute-barrier in the 800m indoors. The previous world indoor U20 record stood to Ethiopia’s Meskerem Legesse at 2:01.03.
Hodgkinson’s time was also comfortably inside the Olympic 800m qualifying mark of 1:59.50. And if she chooses to do so, she can also compete at both the World and European U20 Championships this summer.
Bol and Klaver rewrite the Dutch indoor record books
Fresh from a warm weather training stint in South Africa, Femke Bol from the Netherlands opened her racing season in scintillating form.
It was an equally excellent meeting for her teammate and training partner Lieke Klaver. Between them, they broke three national indoor records over the course of the programme.
Prior to this morning, the Dutch indoor 400m record had stood at 51.82 since 1998 but that mark was subsequently improved twice within ten minutes. Klaver initially took the record down to 51.48 only for Bol to slash another half-a-second from that mark with another world leading 50.96 in the following race.
Bol’s time was an outright lifetime best and the fastest time by a European since fellow 400m hurdles specialist Perri Shakes-Drayton clocked 50.85 to win the 2013 European Indoor Championships.
And while Klaver’s 51.48 was hastily erased from the record books by her 20-year-old teammate, the Dutchwoman did claim ownership of the long-standing national indoor 200m record, the distance at which she topped the European outdoor list in 2020.
In her second race of the day, Klaver powered around one lap of the track in 23.17 to erase the mark of 23.34 which had been held by Els Vader since 1988. Bol also clocked an indoor lifetime best of 23.52 in a separate race.
Another long-standing national record was smashed in the men's 1500m. Hungary's Istvan Szogi set a world lead of 3:37.55 to improve the national indoor record of 3:39.25 which dated back to 1985.