Kenya’s Lilian Odira has dedicated her stunning World Athletics Championships gold medal win to her two young sons, saying that they were the key motivation to her collecting victory.
Odira sprang one of the biggest surprises of the World Athletics Championships Tokyo 25 to run down Olympic champion Keely Hodgkinson in the deepest women’s 800m race in history.
Odira, 26, had barely been mentioned in dispatches as a potential winner. With a pre-championships personal best of 1:56.52, she finished two seconds behind the British champion when they met at the Wanda Diamond League meeting in Silesia in July.
But she found another gear in Tokyo to win Kenya’s seventh gold medal of the World Championships. The dominant Kenyan women have now won every women’s event in Tokyo from 800m to marathon. Faith Kipyegon won the 1500m, Beatrice Chebet the 5000m and 10,000m, Faith Cherotich the 3000m steeplechase and Peres Jepchirchir the marathon.
For much of tonight’s race, defending world champion Mary Moraa looked the most likely Kenyan winner. She led until 600m, when Hodgkinson made her usual surge. She hit the straight in front, but was challenged 50m from the finish line, first by training partner Georgia Hunter Bell, and then by Odira, who flashed home over the final 20m.
She stopped the clock in a championship record of 1:54.62, closely followed by the British pair of Hunter Bell (1:54.90) and Hodgkinson (1:54.91). In a rarity for athletics, all three have female coaches.
Odira, coached by Jacinta Murigura in Nairobi, set an almost two-second personal best and took down the oldest championship record in the book – the 42-year-old mark of 1:54.68 set by Czech athlete Jarmila Kratochvilova in 1983.
A late bloomer after giving birth to two sons, Odira has now improved almost four seconds since she was run out in the semi-finals at the Paris Olympics little more than a year ago.
“This is my first World Championships and I am really grateful to be leaving it as the world champion,” she said. “It has been a long time coming.”
“I didn't have any expectations; I was just following the pace of the race. I managed to have the most powerful finish and I got lucky to be going home with a gold medal. This medal means the world to me. It is for my sons, they are four and two. They are my motivation.”
This is the first time that three women have broken 1:55 in the same race, and the first time that five have broken 1:56. Fifth-placed Sarah Moraa (1:55.74) and sixth-placed Sage Hurta-Klecker (1:55.89) both set personal bests. In almost any other race, they would have been on the podium.
