ATHENS was a city she once preferred not to think about. Now Kelly Holmes loves the place. Seven years after suffering the most devastating experience of her career in the Olympic Stadium, Holmes savoured her greatest moment last night.
After much self-doubt over whether she should even contest the event, Holmes won the women’s 800 metres gold medal by just five hundredths of a second to register Great Britain’s first athletics title of these Games. Now for the double, which no Briton, not even Sebastian Coe, has achieved since Albert Hill in 1920.
Holmes, 34, starts out on a journey this evening that she hopes will carry her on to the podium for a second time on Saturday, in the 1,500 metres. That is the event that she named as her priority at the start of the season, the one she was always certain she would do. It was only after several weeks of torment that she committed to the 800 metres as well.
Not until last Wednesday did Holmes announce that she would run the two-lap race, having insisted in the days before that she was not being secretive but was in genuine anguish over whether to line up for it. Her concern was that, by running a heat, semi-final and final of an
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800 metres championship, she would leave herself fatigued for the metric mile. Now she goes into it running on air.
A medal had been expected of Holmes, but not the gold, Team GB’s seventh of these Games. The way she won it was in marked contrast to the front-running tactics adopted by Paula Radcliffe in the marathon the day before, but while Radcliffe’s personal suffering continues, the general mood has been lifted by Holmes’s victory.
It was a triumph that owed everything to her patience. Holmes trained her sights on her prey from the back of the field during the first lap. Jearl Miles Clark, from the United States, forced a fast pace, while Holmes went through the bell in seventh place, moving up to sixth with some 300 metres to go. Running wide around the top bend, she closed in on Maria Mutola, the defending champion and favourite, from Mozambique.
The finishing straight seemed to last an eternity as Holmes edged past Mutola millimetre by millimetre. Then Hasna Benhassi, from Morocco, and Jolanda Ceplak, from Slovenia, began to close the gap. The finish line arrived just in time for Holmes, who won in 1min 56.38sec, with Benhassi second and Ceplak third. Forty minutes later, Holmes was on top of the podium, Union Jack around her midriff.
It was in Athens in 1997 that Holmes arrived as favourite to win the 1,500 metres at the World Championships, having run five seconds quicker than any of her rivals, but she was out of contention on the first morning, rupturing an Achilles tendon in the opening round. She said recently that she could not remember the stadium as it was before it was rebuilt for these Games because she had been in it for such a short time.
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Although Holmes has a collection of titles that make her the finest woman middle-distance runner Britain has produced, she had never won a global title until last night. She is twice the Commonwealth Games 1,500 metres champion and won medals at World Championships, Olympics and European Championships, but never gold in the three biggest events.
The first should have come last year, when she finished runner-up over 1,500 metres in the World Indoor Championships. The victor was Regina Jacobs, who later tested positive for THG, a designer steroid, and has since been banned. In the World Indoor Championships this year, Holmes looked a strong contender for the gold, but tripped and fell.
Holmes was an outstanding young athlete who dropped out to pursue a career in the Army, in which she became a judo champion. But, while watching the 1992 Olympic Games in Barcelona on television in her barracks, she spotted a familiar figure in the heats of the 3,000 metres — Lisa York, a rival from her schooldays — and it inspired her to return to the sport. Now her journey from the Services to the top step of the podium is complete.
After winning the silver medal over 800 metres at the World Championships in Paris last year — when Mutola, who took the gold, cleared a path for her friend and former training partner — accusations of teamwork cast a shadow over her celebrations. But if there were doubts over the authenticity of her achievement then, there were none last night. Victory was hers and hers alone. Like the Olympic Stadium itself, Holmes looked a remodelled version of excellence.
BEST OF BRITISH
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Kelly Holmes last night became only the seventh British woman to win an athletics gold medal at the Olympics. The others on the roll of honour are:
1964: Mary Rand, long jump; Ann Packer, 800 metres.
1972: Mary Peters, pentathlon.
1984: Tessa Sanderson, javelin.
1992: Sally Gunnell, 400 metres hurdles.
2000: Denise Lewis, heptathlon.