Keely Hodgkinson and expected gold medal rivals Audrey Werro and Femke Broeders-Bol remain on course for their highly anticipated showdown after safely reaching Thursday’s women’s 800m semi-finals at the European Athletics Championships.<\/p>\n
Olympic champion Hodgkinson, winner of the past two European titles, controlled her heat throughout to win in one minute 57.28 seconds – the fastest time across the four heats on Tuesday morning.<\/p>\n
Swiss athlete Werro, who stunned Hodgkinson by running the fastest time for 43 years to beat the Briton earlier this season, appeared equally comfortable as she won her race in 1:57.83.<\/p>\n
There were no issues either for Femke Broeders-Bol. The fast-improving Dutch two-time world 400m hurdles champion, who chose to switch events this season, crossed the line first in 1:59.96.<\/p>\n
Hodgkinson’s post-race interview with BBC Sport was briefly interrupted by Italy’s Eloisa Coiro, who said the 24-year-old was “an inspiration on and off the track”.<\/p>\n
Hodgkinson, who has had a couple of setbacks during her outdoor campaign, said: “I have worked so hard and the shape has been there all year. It’s just been an unfortunate couple of events that have led to me maybe being a little bit off.<\/p>\n
“Championships are a fresh start. That felt very good, very comfortable. The standard has gone up but it’s good, it brings out the best in me.<\/p>\n
“All it takes is one person to raise the bar and you think more things are possible. Everyone knows that to keep up you have to keep getting better. It’s a really exciting time for the women’s 800m.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Keely Hodgkinson and expected gold medal rivals Audrey Werro and Femke Broeders-Bol remain on course for their highly…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":590179,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[61,60,112],"class_list":["post-590178","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-sports","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/590178","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=590178"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/590178\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/590179"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=590178"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=590178"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=590178"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}