“My dad was telling me recently that when I was 10, all I used to say was, ‘I want to be Olympic champion like Jess Ennis, I want to go to the Olympics.’ But growing up, I always felt like it was so far away,” she continues. “She [younger me] would be very shocked to know I was Olympic champion – because coming through the English schools and National Cross-Country, I wasn’t winning everything. I had silvers, I had bronzes. I made a couple of England teams, but I actually never ran for England on the track until I was about 16. It is important to remember when you’re young, you don’t have to be winning everything, you just need to keep on your track and keep focused. I do believe everybody’s time will come, whether that’s when you’re 17 or when you’re 29 or 34. Everybody’s time will come, I just believe that mine is now.”
Keely’s time has come thanks in part to her commitment to her wellbeing – she tells me she has been working with a sports psychiatrist since 2022. “Back then, it was more for me off the track than on,” she admits. “My emotions were all over the place. I was a bit low. I didn’t have amazing motivation. Personal development was probably a big factor, too, just growing up… we had three championships that year and it was mentally so draining. I wanted help getting out of that slump. They’re just good to also offload to, with everything going on, whether that’s personally, on or off the track. Sometimes you need someone to talk to who’s got nothing to do with your life and doesn’t know the people in it.”
Chat like this from an athlete was unheard of until the likes of Simone Biles and Naomi Osaka started openly talking about how becoming a champion can bring huge mental strain. Becoming an Olympic champion takes intense mental work as well as the physical. “I always say to myself before a race, ‘It’s like now or never.’ I’d worked on it all year, just trying to lock into that mentality of nothing else other than gold. That has helped. I have good self-belief, but I felt like it could be better, and I felt like I could control that voice of doubt a bit more. Everybody has a voice of doubt – that’s not abnormal. The top athletes in the world will always have that little voice in their head, like everybody else. It’s just your reaction to it that makes the difference. I wanted to almost shut that up,” Keely says.
What does a gold medal mindset look like? “We would talk about things like, ‘What’s the difference between a medallist and a gold medallist mindset?’ A medallist may be happy with making the podium, whereas a gold medallist would be really pissed off with silver and bronze,” she replies. “A gold medallist wouldn’t be focused on what everybody else is doing, but a medallist might have some thoughts about what their opponents are up to, or who’s ahead and who’s behind. Someone who’s so confident in their gold medal mindset is only focused on themselves. For me, that seems to trick my brain a little bit into getting into that really confident mindset.”
Gathering this strength of mind is even more impressive when you consider Keely considers her run up to the Paris Olympics as one of the most testing – and retrospectively, empowering – times in her life. “To be honest, this whole year has actually not been easy at all,” she admits. “I got injured in November last year, which kept me out until the end of January. My whole plan was out the window. I was so unfit in January, I was getting battered by the girls in my [training] group. I’d be injured, then I’d be ill, then I’d start to run again, then I couldn’t run again, I wasn’t ready, then I’d get ill again. It felt like a never-ending cycle. I was so far off when I needed to be. But now that I look back, it was actually a huge blessing in disguise, because I was allowed to put together back-to-back training weeks. My endurance improved so much. I went from not being able to keep up with the 1,500 metre girls to running right alongside them – which I’ve never been able to do before. I got stronger in the gym. I was able to make all these gains, and that’s what the difference has been in terms of me running faster than I ever have before.”