An MRI Scan Found Keely Hodgkinson’s Hamstring Tendon Split in Two

Keely Hodgkinson has a tendon in her hamstring that is split in two, a variation that turned up on an MRI scan more than a year ago and that she talked about publicly for the first time this week. The Olympic 800m champion races at Athlos in north London on Friday night.

Speaking to reporters before the meet, Hodgkinson said: “My body is quite literally built different. I have two tendons where the tendon tore [last year]. So where everyone has one tendon, mine is split, so I have two. We’re trying to figure out if it’s a strength or a weakness. So, when one of them tore, I still had the other one because it split like this.”

The tear behind all of this came before the European final in Birmingham on Aug. 14, where she ran 1:55.01 for silver behind Audrey Werro. She has since described it as a grade 2C tear, as the PA news agency reported.

What a Grade 2C Tear Means

The label comes from the British Athletics Muscle Injury Classification, which Noel Pollock and colleagues published in the British Journal of Sports Medicine in 2014 and which is now used well beyond track and field. The number grades how much muscle is caught up in it, and a 2 covers a tear across 10 to 50 percent of the cross-section, or 5 to 15 centimeters along its length. An “a” stays in the fascia at the edge of the muscle, a “b” sits where muscle meets tendon, and a “c” runs into the tendon itself.

Pollock’s group followed 65 hamstring injuries in 44 elite British track and field athletes and reported in 2016 that the “c” tears took significantly longer to return an athlete to full training, and recurred significantly more often, than tears that left the tendon alone.

Hodgkinson has now had two of them. The injury she picked up in the final strides of a training session in February 2025, days before the first Keely Klassic in Birmingham, was reported by Sky Sports at the time as a grade 3C, and it cost her the meet that carries her name along with the world indoor title in Nanjing. Birmingham in August was a 2C. Both of them went into the tendon.

“I haven’t missed any training the last three weeks, I’ve just had to alter my approach, take my foot off the speed, because that’s when it’s most risky, and go at it from a strength perspective,” she said. “I’ve not really felt anything for like two weeks now, it’s more the mental. You’re very hyper-aware, like, ‘Oh, is that something? Is it not? Do I trust my body to go again?'”

A Variation That Turns Out Not to Be Rare

Hodgkinson has not said which of the three hamstring muscles carries her split tendon, and whichever it is, the anatomists would not be surprised. Łukasz Olewnik and colleagues dissected 100 lower limbs from 50 cadavers for a classification published this year in Annals of Anatomy and found a double main tendon on the semimembranosus in 24 percent of them, with another 10 percent carrying three. What nobody has done is follow the people who have them and count how often they get hurt.

Her indoor season went perfectly. She ran 1:54.87 at Liévin on Feb. 19 for the world indoor record, taking most of a second off a mark that had stood since 2002, then won the world indoor title in Toruń a month later.

Outdoors it came apart in stages. She ran a British record of 1:54.33 in Stockholm on June 7 and still lost to Werro. Two weeks later she pulled out of the 400m final at the UK Championships minutes before the gun, her coach Trevor Painter putting it down to tightness. Then came the fall she described to Sky Sports in July, jogging a cooldown when she caught her foot on what she called “a metal mesh grate on the floor” and took chunks out of both knees.

She has since tied the Birmingham tear back to that fall, telling BBC Sport that she could not use her quad properly for a while afterwards.

Werro, 22, went unbeaten outdoors and broke 1:54 three times, in Stockholm, Paris and Zurich, where her 1:53.70 stands as the world lead. Two women have ever run faster: Jarmila Kratochvilova, whose 1:53.28 in Munich in July 1983 is still the world record, and Nadezhda Olizarenko, who ran 1:53.43 in Moscow in 1980.

Hodgkinson missed Zurich and the Diamond League final in Brussels, then finished second to Werro again at the World Athletics Ultimate Championship in Budapest on Sept. 12, 0.38 seconds back in 1:56.26. She wants Kratochvilova’s record, and she has said she needs Werro to get near it.

“Audrey’s done incredible this year, but it’s still long seconds away, and you do need someone there the entire way,” she said.

Athlos, the women’s meet Alexis Ohanian started, runs Friday night at the StoneX Stadium in north London, with $65,000 to the winner of each event. It is the last race of her season.

“The most important year will be LA; that’s the one that you really want to get right,” she told the Telegraph. “I’m 24. There’s still so much to do and I love competing.”