Keely Klassic: Why I’m rooting for Hodgkinson’s ambitious showcase
What the Keely Klassic lacks in spelling, Hodgkinson’s mash-up of athletics and entertainment makes up for in forward thinking, writes Ed Warner.
“Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon them.” Keely Hodgkinson may not have nailed greatness just yet, but if she does secure that status it will likely be from a combination of all three factors Shakespeare cites.
Gold and silver Olympic medals at the tender age of 22 and now the brass neck to put her name to a major athletics meet: the Keely Klassic, no less. Zero points for spelling, but top marks for innovation and ambition.
This Saturday’s event at Birmingham’s Utilita Arena fills the void left by UK Athletics’ retirement of its annual Indoor Grand Prix. Instead of gathering a swathe of the world’s top athletes – or at least those committed to the winter indoor season – Hodgkinson’s team have curated a field of leading Brits, each taking a tilt at a national, European or world record.
The 2024 BBC Sports Personality of the Year is herself targeting the 800m world indoor record set by Slovenia’s Jolanda Čeplak on the very day of Hodgkinson’s birth. Written in the stars?
“Almost a bit creepy.”
Hodgkinson on the record she’s chasing being set on the day she was born
While Britain’s most high profile athlete is not taking a personal financial risk in hosting the Keely Klassic, she is certainly putting her reputation on the line. It is one thing to call out a record attempt, but building a whole meet around it is something else entirely.
Never mind the risk of failure on the day, what of hamstrings and head colds in the run up to it? Elite performance, in which success is measured in hundredths or even thousandths of seconds, doesn’t allow for athletes to be wrapped in cotton wool to ensure they make the start line fit and healthy.
Hodgkinson’s agent Nick Pearson has explained the thinking behind the event to me. It is intended as a mash-up of elite track and field and entertainment in which British stars are showcased for a British audience.
In conversation he cites a string of other sports that his team is taking lessons from, ranging from the obvious of boxing and darts through the way badminton uses the same Birmingham venue to the left-field of greyhound racing. Expect each athlete, then, to have a different coloured bib, even if they are not starting from traps.
Presentational tricks are likely to irritate die-hard athletics fans, but Pearson is rightly aiming for a much broader audience. He has hired the team behind the staging of SPOTY, which should give you some clues. Expect athlete entries into the arena to echo boxing’s ring walks and a closing show bordering on the theatrical.
I applaud the initiative behind the Keely Klassic. Athletics has been searching for new audiences and experimenting with different formats for years now, but tradition has tended to act as a sheet anchor, slowing progress to a crawl while other sports surge ahead.
Michael Johnson’s Grand Slam series may be the big disruptor this year, but there is surely scope for multiple shots at solving the conundrum of minimal public cut-through in the long months between major championships.
It is notable that Hodgkinson and Pearson are taking an independent route to market, albeit with the support of UK Athletics as well as the recently-created Athletic Ventures enterprise it is part of. I know from experience that governing bodies can struggle to innovate in the face of resistance from the most vocal traditionalists within their memberships.
Road running has prospered for decades in a free market led by the London Marathon and Great Run organisers. No reason why the same couldn’t be true for track and field.
While this weekend’s meet aims to capitalise on Keely Hodgkinson’s current high profile, Nick Pearson makes clear that it is ultimately staged in the interests of all the athletes involved. Where they are often seen as simply the product, here he envisages them as the driving force.
As a cohort, athletes have long been vocal in expressing their frustration at the difficulties in generating and then maintaining public interest. The quid pro quo, Pearson tells me, is that the stars themselves need to commit to the work required off the track to publicise this and similar initiatives. They have to take responsibility for shaping the future.
Unsurprisingly, some are better than others at seeing this bigger picture. Not all would be comfortable in the equivalent of a face-off at a boxing weigh-in, but they do need to embrace such razzle dazzle.
Tickets for the Keely Klassic are still available. The meet will be shown on BBC iPlayer. Nick Pearson believes this inaugural edition is just a first step, taking the presentation of athletics 20 per cent of the way to the ultimate destination.
All those with an interest in the sport, however casual, should wish Keely Hodgkinson all the best on Saturday, on and off the track.
Edwards’ knickers
You can watch Jolanda Čeplak‘s 2002 world record run here on YouTube. It was quite some race.
Later that year, Kelly Holmes took bronze in the outdoor European Championships, some way behind winner Jolanda Čeplak. Holmes caused a stir with her post-race comments.
“There was no way of catching her,” she said. “Without saying too much, take your own guesses.” In 2007 Čeplak was banned for two years after testing positive for EPO in an out-of-competition test.
Jonathan Edwards’ response to Holmes at the time hasn’t aged well: “It always seems to be the prerogative of the middle and distance runners to get their knickers in a twist about drugs. Kelly has been ill-advised and she may live to regret what she said.”
Doing good, digging deep
The TV cameras found Plymouth Argyle owner Simon Hallett in the stands as his club toppled Liverpool in the FA Cup at the weekend. Cue time-worn thoughts about what a televised home cup tie against Premier League opposition means for the finances of a team on a lower rung of English football’s ladder.
Benefactors can get a tough press from hard-to-please fans, but cup fairytales provide a reminder of the losses that professional clubs typically run up across a range of sports. Half a million quid as an annual starting expectation for owners in football’s League Two, scaling up sharply from there.
Similar maths in the second tier of English rugby union. Cricket’s lesser counties scrape by on monies from the ECB (see last week’s column). And as the Super League season begins once more, an article in this weekend’s Observer claims rugby league’s top clubs typically rely on a benefactor tipping £1m to £2m into their coffers each season.
That piece, by Aaron Bower, provides a reminder of Super League’s 2022 strategic partnership with agency IMG which effectively closed the league to automatic promotion and relegation. Instead, clubs’ credentials are ranked on a range of criteria – including attendances – to determine eligibility for entry to the top tier.
Difficult to see any tangible benefit from the IMG arrangement yet, either in fresh cash entering the system or Super League’s clubs being on a firmer footing. Benefactors will need to keep writing those cheques for the foreseeable.
You can read Aaron Bower on the dark clouds over Super League here.
Ed Warner is chair of GB Wheelchair Rugby and writes his sport column at sportinc.substack.com