Keely Hodgkinson was mugged in broad daylight by soft rules and weak officials_t

There’s a word for what happened to Keely Hodgkinson on Friday night, and it isn’t “sport”. It’s a mugging. A daylight robbery broadcast live across Europe, orchestrated by officials who have apparently mistaken elite athletics for a toddler’s sports day where everyone gets a shiny sticker just for taking part.

Hodgkinson, our golden girl of the track, was on course for a glorious, historic third-straight 800m gold at the European Championships. Instead, she was forced to settle for silver. And who took the gold? Audrey Werro. A runner who, let’s be brutally honest, had absolutely no right to even be standing on the starting line.

In case you missed the farce, Werro took a tumble in her semi-final after being accidentally tripped by another runner. Bad luck? Absolutely. Undeserved? You bet. But instead of dusting herself off and accepting that sometimes the track is a cruel, unforgiving mistress, Werro and her camp kicked up a fuss.

And the officials, in their infinite, bleeding-heart wisdom, decided that because Werro was leading at the exact moment gravity got the better of her, she deserved a golden ticket straight into the final, so they unceremoniously plonked her into the race. Fantastic – that’s my game plan sorted for the next local Parkrun: I’ll sprint the first five yards, stage a dramatic face-plant, then demand a trophy because I was technically leading.

I mean for crying out loud, since when did we start handing out free passes in elite sport just because something “unfair” happened? If we started rewriting the rules every time someone slipped over, Steven Gerrard would have a Premier League winner’s medal. But we don’t. Or at least, we didn’t use to.

Sport is supposed to be the ultimate meritocracy. You run the race, you cross the line, and if you’re fast enough, you progress. If you trip, fall, pull a hamstring, or get your shoelaces tied together, that is just the brutal reality of competition. Accidents happen. Life is unfair sometimes. Deal with it.

By reinstating Werro, the powers-that-be have set a terrifying, utterly laughable precedent. We are actively incentivising whinging about bad luck. We are telling athletes: Don’t worry about actually crossing the finish line, just make sure you have a really good excuse and a lawyer on standby if things go south.

Audrey Werro is a talented runner, nobody is disputing that. But she did not win her semi-final. She didn’t even finish in a qualifying spot. Parachuting her into the final like a radio phone-in competition winner was a slap in the face to every other runner who actually completed their race without doing an impromptu impression of a sack of spuds.

Hodgkinson and her legion of fans have every right to be absolutely fizzing with rage. Keely ran her heart out, played by the actual rules, and was beaten by a ghost who had been resurrected by a committee of clipboard-wielding bureaucrats terrified of upsetting anyone.

It’s symptomatic of a wider disease creeping into society, isn’t it? This desperate, hand-wringing need to make sure nobody ever feels hard done by. We can’t just accept that sometimes an accident ruins your day. No, we have to convene a panel, review the footage in ultra-slow motion, and retroactively bend the universe so that the “victim” gets a thoroughly unearned leg-up.

Well, I’ve got news for the officials: Keely Hodgkinson is the real victim here. She was robbed of her hattrick of golds on the altar of manufactured fairness.

Next time there’s a major championship, maybe they should just scrap the semi-finals altogether. Let’s just have everyone submit a 500-word essay on why they deserve to be in the final, and the officials can pick the ones with the best sob stories.

Until then, Keely remains the true champion in the eyes of anyone with a shred of common sense. As for the officials who cooked up this farce? They need to take a long, hard look in the mirror – assuming they don’t trip over on the way there and demand some sort of shiny compensation package.