At 19:00 BST on Friday, inside a sold-out StoneX Stadium in Barnet, north London, the starter will call the field for two laps of the track — and the race the Olympic movement once ruled women were incapable of finishing will be the one the whole night is built around.
Keely Hodgkinson, the Olympic 800m champion and, since February, the world indoor record holder, headlines ATHLOS London, the first edition of the women-only track league staged outside the United States. Hodgkinson defends the ATHLOS 800m title won in New York last year on a card of seven disciplines — 100m, 200m, 400m, 800m, the Mile, 100m hurdles and long jump — contested by 42 athletes for a single-night purse of $1,057,000, the largest ever distributed at a one-off track meeting.
Sha’Carri Richardson, Gabby Thomas, Amber Anning, Daryll Neita, Rhasidat Adeleke and Tara Davis-Woodhall are all on the entry list. Georgia Hunter Bell, Hodgkinson’s training partner, opted for the Mile rather than a head-to-head over two laps, coming as it does days after the World Athletics Ultimate Championship in Budapest. Winners collect $65,000 and a Tiffany & Co. crown. The BBC carries it on Red Button, iPlayer and the Sport app, with distribution to more than 150 countries.
The race that was erased for 32 years
On 2 August 1928, nine women from six nations lined up in Amsterdam’s Olympic Stadium for the first women’s 800m in Olympic history. Lina Radke of Germany won in 2:16.8, a world record. What followed was not celebration but a press panic: newspapers reported that competitors had collapsed in distress at the finish, that the distance was beyond female endurance, that the spectacle was unedifying.
The reporting was, by the assessment of historians who later examined the accounts, false. Lynne Emery’s research concluded the athletes were simply winded in the way any middle-distance runner is winded after a hard race. It did not matter. Between 1928 and 1932 the event was removed from the Olympic programme, and women were restricted to sprinting. The 800m was not restored until Rome in 1960 — a gap of 32 years, eight Games, and an unknowable number of careers that never happened.
That is the specific inheritance sitting behind Friday’s headline race. Not a general story about sexism in sport, but one event, one false narrative, and three decades of enforced absence.
Hodgkinson and the record that fell in Liévin
The athlete carrying that event into a stadium sold out for women’s track has had a season of unusual symmetry. On 19 February in Liévin, Hodgkinson ran 1:54.87 indoors, becoming the first woman under 1:55 and removing Jolanda Čeplak’s 1:55.82 from the books — a mark set on 3 March 2002, the day Hodgkinson was born, and one long shadowed by Čeplak’s subsequent positive test for EPO. A world indoor title followed in March.
Budapest, though, provided the corrective. At the Ultimate Championship last weekend, Switzerland’s Audrey Werro went to the front on the first lap and stayed there, winning in 1:55.88 with Hodgkinson second in 1:56.26 and Femke Broeders-Bol third in 1:56.74. Werro and Broeders-Bol are not in London, which removes the sharpest edge from Friday’s field but does not make the assignment straightforward: this is a sold-out home crowd, six days after a defeat, at a meeting where the 800m is the billing.
Why the format matters
ATHLOS is not a charitable gesture. Founded by Alexis Ohanian and launched in New York in 2024, it is structured so that eligible participating athletes hold direct equity in the league — the only professional track competition where that is true. Prize money runs six deep in every event, from $65,000 down to $6,000, with a $25,000 bonus for overall champions across the season’s two meetings and $2.1m distributed in total.
That structure is the argument. For most of the professional era, women’s middle-distance running has been commercially framed as a supporting act — a race to be squeezed into a broadcast window between men’s events, paid accordingly. ATHLOS inverts the hierarchy and sold out its London stadium doing it. The proof of concept is the ticket sales, not the rhetoric.
What it means from here
Two things will be worth watching beyond Friday’s results. The first is whether the sold-out London debut converts into a fixture rather than a novelty — whether ATHLOS returns to the UK in 2027 and whether the established circuit, the Diamond League in particular, responds by restructuring how it schedules and pays its women’s fields.
The second is competitive. The 800m is in the deepest condition it has occupied in years, with Werro, Hodgkinson and Broeders-Bol separated by under a second in Budapest and Hodgkinson’s indoor mark suggesting the outdoor world record of 1:53.28, set by Jarmila Kratochvílová in 1983 and untouched for 43 years, is no longer theoretical. That record, too, carries an asterisk of suspicion from a different era of the sport. Erasing it cleanly would be the most emphatic possible answer to 1928.
The women who ran in Amsterdam were told the distance was beyond them. On Friday night, in a stadium that sold out to watch them, it is the centrepiece.
Sports journalist and editor at SportsPortal.net. Covers cricket, football, Formula 1, tennis, and basketball with a focus on how global sports connect with Pakistani audiences. Follows the PSL, Pakistan national cricket team, Premier League, and major international tournaments. Has reported on sports for digital audiences since 2021.
839 articles published
