Mondo’s variable hydraulic banked track at the Arena Stade Couvert de Liévin once again delivered a world-record breaking performance with Great Britain’s Keely Hodgkinson reducing the global 800m short track mark to 1:54.87.
The Paris 2024 Olympic Games champion over the same distance sped around four laps of the Mondo athletics track in northern France to take almost a second off a world record that had stood for nearly 24 years.
“That was really fun. I’ve been looking forward to this for a good few weeks. I was really excited to come here. I felt like it was going to happen today, it was just a matter of how fast I could go,” said the elated Briton.
Her record feat became the latest in series of world record that have been set on Liévin’s Mondo athletics track. Originally installed in 2007, it not only is still delivering world class performances but is also hosting around 20 grassroots athletics meetings every winter.
Noticeably, many of Hodgkinson’s greatest triumphs have come on Mondo athletics tracks including her victories at the 2024 Olympic Games and European Athletics Championships as well as, earlier in her stellar career, winning gold at the 2021 European Athletics Indoor Championships in Torun.
She plans to return to Torun and the city’s Kujawsko-Pomorska Arena Torun, which can boast of a Sportflex Super X K39 athletics track, in four weeks’ time for this year’s World Athletics Indoor Championships.
Hodgkinson delivered the seventh world record at Liévin’s World Athletics Indoor Tour Gold meeting in the last six years.
She followed in the immediate footsteps of Jakob Ingebrigtsen who set world short track mile record of 3:45.14 there in 2025, as well as setting a world short track 1500m record of 3:29.63 en route to his performance over the classic imperial distance.
Liévin was the penultimate stop in this year’s series of World Athletics Indoor Tour Gold meetings, with the concluding meeting in Torun on Sunday 22 February acting as a dress rehearsal for the forthcoming World Athletics Indoor Championships.
Mondo athletics track will have beneath the feet of athletes at four of the eight 2026 World Athletics Indoor Tour Gold meetings.
In addition to Hodgkinson’s world record, Mondo athletics tracks have already delivered