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Georgia Bell’s coach says he always knew the Paris 1500 metres bronze medallist was “something special” but feared she was the one who had got away.
The 30-year-old Briton completed a fairytale comeback to the sport at the Stade de France in the city of her birth, finishing third on Olympic debut in a national-record 3:52.61 on Saturday.
Bell stepped away from running around 2017 whilst studying at the University of California, but laced her trainers back up during the Covid-19 lockdown – initially with no ambitions of ever taking sport seriously again.
Trevor Painter, who alongside wife Jenny Meadows looks after Bell at M11 Track Club, said: “I was gutted when she went to America. You could just see something special. We were coaching a girl called Leah Barrow at Birmingham University and she was at the same uni.
“She was doing a few sessions with her and then she said can I join in. The first time she came, I thought she was like a society girl, like Tamara Beckwith, glamorous girl, but when I saw her run, I thought, ‘Oh, all right.’ She very quickly rose through the development, but the next thing she said she was off to do a masters in the States.
“But you don’t want to hold people back. It’s their life and they do what they want to do.”
Painter and Meadows are the coaching brains behind three Olympic medallists in Paris – Bell, 800m champion Keely Hodgkinson and Lewis Davey, who lowered a 28-year-old European record and collected bronze with the men’s 4x400m relay quartet.
Bell, who as recently as May was still working full time in cybersecurity sales, initially came under Painter’s wing as a prodigious junior, English schools under-15 800m champion in 2008, but called it quits after a series of injuries and setbacks.
Meadows said: “It broke her. She tells a story of her last ever race was 4:37 and she was on the start line thinking she will never run again.”
Painter added: “Too much volume, injuries, she fell out of love with it.”
Paris was the first Olympics to welcome crowds back after near-empty stadia characterised Tokyo and Beijing.
Those Games were marred by Covid-19, but Bell’s fairytale story might have never happened without it.
It was only during lockdown that Bell, who watched Paris GB team-mate Laura Muir win Tokyo 1500m silver, took up running again, just as a way of getting out of the house.
She began with a couple of parkruns, and was pleasantly surprised after clocking a time of 16 minutes and eight seconds during a five-kilometre run in London’s Bushy Park.
She then signed up to some British Milers Club races and was pleased with her performances in those, too, but wondered what more she could accomplish with a coach.
One day, Painter got a call out of the blue from his former athlete, asking if he would consider taking her on for a second spell.
She said, ‘I used to be alright.’ They went for a run and she destroyed him.”— Trevor Painter
Meadows said: “November 2022 she phoned Trevor and said ‘I’ve been doing some sessions, I’ve been trying to remember what I did years ago and I’ve run 4:16.’ We were like, ‘That’s pretty good.’”
Painter recalled: “Her and her boyfriend were doing a lot of cycling, he is a good cyclist.
“During Covid he said, ‘Shall we go for a run?’ and she said, ‘You don’t want to run with me.’ He was like, ‘What do you mean?’ She said, ‘I used to be alright.’ They went for a run and she destroyed him.”
Bell is still based in Clapham, but travels to M11’s Manchester-area base on the occasional long weekend and for training camps.
“The really good thing about Georgia is you tell her to do something, very like Keely, we compare her to Keely so much,” said Meadows.
“She throws herself into the sessions. She is a revelation. She thinks, ‘Well my team-mate can be an Olympic champion, I am doing similar sessions’.”
Nevertheless, Meadows, a former 800m world bronze medallist, confessed : “The Keely situation was expected, but this was not.”
Bell took a four-month sabbatical from her cybersecurity gig to prepare for the Olympics and is technically due back in September.
The day before the newly-crowned British champion was due to compete at the London Diamond League meet in July, what was supposed to be an innocent update from a different cybersecurity company, CrowdStrike, caused a catastrophic global IT outage.
Painter recalled: “She was furious, because she said ‘I’m losing so much commission because I’m not in work’. She was getting phone calls and had to deflect them to work colleagues.”
Bell’s LinkedIn bio still reads ‘ambitious and hard-working cyber security enthusiast / running nerd’.
This weekend, after earning the chance to add ‘Olympic medallist’ to her CV, Bell admitted she might need to have a conversation with her employers.
And this time around, it is looking likelier that, at least in Painter’s case, Bell will not be walking away again anytime soon.
He added: “She is 30 but Kelly Holmes was 34 when she did the double gold. And she is very lightly raced, she has had a lot of years out of the sport so her body is not hanging on like some people at her age.”
