From Parkrun to Olympic 1500 metres bronze in 18 months: Georgia Bell has just completed one of the most stirring transformations ever seen by a British athlete. Under pristine blue skies at Stade de France, the 30-year-old ascended to sport’s top table, taking a staggering four seconds off her personal best to capture this rapturously received medal. To think, it was only last year that her proudest achievement in athletics was running 5km in 16 and a half minutes at Bushy Park. Now, thanks to a combination of colossal talent and inexhaustible self-belief, she graces an Olympic podium.
“I just didn’t know journeys like this existed,” Bell said this summer. Her incredulity was magnified tenfold at this performance, as she somehow found the strength to overhaul Ethiopia’s Diribe Welteji over the final metres to cross the line in 3min 52.61sec, a British record. Here was a woman who, at one stage, had just about given up on her track career. An English schools 800 metres champion in 2008, she struggled to convert that precocious promise, until a remarkable Parkrun time on the back of minimal training convinced her to believe in second chances.
“I just didn’t know journeys like this existed,” Bell said this summer. Her incredulity was magnified tenfold at this performance, as she somehow found the strength to overhaul Ethiopia’s Diribe Welteji over the final metres to cross the line in 3min 52.61sec, a British record. Here was a woman who, at one stage, had just about given up on her track career. An English schools 800 metres champion in 2008, she struggled to convert that precocious promise, until a remarkable Parkrun time on the back of minimal training convinced her to believe in second chances.
This was a more lavish reward than she had dared imagine. Bell works full-time in cyber security, using artificial intelligence to find out how companies’ computer systems are being hacked. But in what has passed for downtime, she has nurtured an outlandish dream and found a way to bring it to glorious fruition. An athlete who had settled simply on running for “fun and fitness” has delivered, spectacularly, on the most daunting stage of all.
“Mine is a very unconventional route,” she said, with no little understatement. “I’ve had so many nice messages from people saying, ‘You’ve inspired me to get back into an old sport or an old hobby.’ When I got back into it, the goal wasn’t to make the Olympics, that just seemed bonkers. It shows that it’s never too late to go back to something you enjoy. There’s no set path. It’s just lovely to know that these routes exist.”
It is Trevor Painter and Jenny Meadows, Keely Hodgkinson’s coaches, who have helped make this happen. Bell first contacted Painter in early 2023, in a fit of excitement about her Parkrun numbers, and together the two have worked furiously ever since to capitalise on all her untapped potential. Having rediscovered her love of running during the pandemic, she wanted to see how far her continuous improvement could take her. Now she knows. It is one of the most heartwarming reinventions British track and field has known.
This season alone, Bell, the daughter of Channel Five News political editor Andy Bell, has carved 14 seconds off her 1500 metres best. She knows when to time her surges, too, edging here past Welteji to trail home Kenya’s Faith Kipyegon – now a triple Olympic champion over this distance – and Jessica Hull of Australia. She relegated her compatriot Laura Muir, who has had so many near-misses at global level, to fifth. Muir was generous in praise, describing Bell’s achievement as “unbelievable”.
Hardly surprisingly, Bell raised her hands to her head in disbelief. After all, she only returned to athletics full-time little over a year ago, after a spell in duathlon. Today, she can count herself as Olympic medallist and British record-holder, with a time that sits third on the European all-time list.
Bell has profited from a summer sabbatical from her nine-to-five job to pursue her Olympic ambitions, and the plan has worked wonders. Travelling fortnightly from London to Manchester to join Painter’s cohort, which includes Hodgkinson, she achieved a European silver medal this year despite suffering an infected spike wound in the heats that left her struggling to walk. That gave her the conviction, in her words, that she could “get it done even when things are going wrong”. She could reflect here that everything went just about as well as she could have possibly hoped.
Courtesy of a wonderfully liquid, economical running style, she is improving in just about every event that she commits to, from the 1500 metres all the way through to the 10,000. Bell has cultivated a dual persona, calling herself an “ambitious and hard-working cybersecurity expert/running nerd”. On her LinkedIn site are two photographs: one of her in smart business clothes in the office lift, the second of her a picture of grace on the track. “With Q1 closed out, it’s time for me to put all my focus on aiming for the Olympic Games in Paris,” she wrote.
She can consider it mission accomplished. Not that it was clear whether she would return to work any time soon. “When the laptop got slammed shut, I thought, ‘There’s no way I’ll win a medal,’” she said. “I’ll probably have a chat with them now things have changed slightly.” Slightly? For Georgia Bell, the most delightfully improbable of Britain’s athletics medallists, life will never be the same again.
In the circ*mstances, it was hard not to feel for Muir, who ran a fabulous race but was yet again denied at the death.
“Faith and I have been in global finals together since 2015,” she said. “I’ve known her very well – she’s amazing. Jess [Hull] won her first medal and I’m really close to her, too. But Georgia has done absolutely brilliantly. It’s a very nice podium. I’m just sad I’m not on it.”
