On the morning of the London Diamond League last month, Georgia Bell woke up rather annoyed.
On sabbatical from her job at a cybersecurity firm, the 30-year-old’s mind was less on the afternoon’s run-out over 800m and more on the earning opportunity sailing by as the CrowdStrike IT outage plunged businesses around the world into chaos.
“She was furious,” Bell’s coach, Trevor Painter explained. “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 colleagues.”
By the end of the day, though, there was consolation in the form of a 1:56.28 clocking over two laps, the fourth-fastest ever by a British woman in what is not even Bell’s favoured event. Thanks to that performance, when last night’s Olympic 1500m final set off inside world record pace, she had conviction to latch on.
The surprise bronze medal that was eventually her reward put a cap on one of the most remarkable stories of these Games, of the precocious talent that left the track in 2017 and five years later, via Parkrun, came back.
Painter is, alongside wife and former athlete Jenny Meadows, one half of the coaching team that also steered Keely Hodgkinson to 800m gold at these Games. He knew Bell on the other side of her athletics exile, briefly coaching her before she left the UK to study and train in California in 2015.
“I was gutted when she went to America,” Painter admitted last night. “You could just see something special.
“The first time she came [to train], I thought she was like a society girl, like Tamara Beckwith, a glamorous girl. But when I saw her run, I thought: ‘Oh, alright'.
“But then the next thing she said was she was off to do a masters in the States. You don’t want to hold people back. It’s their life and they do what they want to do.”
Bell’s experience in the US, where she was dogged by stress fractures caused by the volume of her training, “broke her” according to Meadows. In her final collegiate race in Texas, in 2017, she ran 4:32.02, 40 seconds slower than the British record she set in the Stade de France last night.
In the hours before the race of her life, Bell searched her phone and found the WhatsApp exchange with Painter from November 2022 that ultimately led to their reunion. It was clear straight away that running talent remained intact, but even on training camps this winter, so, too, did her ring rust.
“It was the track that really found her out because she’d not been on the track for a lot of years,” Meadows said. “Our other athletes were actually like: ‘I thought she might have been a little bit better’, because she was good on the hills and the road running.”
Those training partners include Hodgkinson, though Bell does many of her sessions with male club runners in London, where she still lives and where, as things stand, she is due back at work on September 1.
She will speak to her bosses in the coming days and weeks, admitting in one of the quainter understatements of the meet that “things have changed slightly”. Though her sabbatical, which began in May, might have cost her a few quid, it has been a game-changer.
“The day after World Indoors [in Glasgow in March], she got an early flight back down to London and was at her desk for 12pm,” Painter said. “What a surreal comedown.
“But since May she has not had to get up early, she can train when she needs to train, sleep when she needs to sleep and just focus on being an athlete. It makes a huge difference.”
Painter and Meadows have enjoyed a remarkable Games, so much so that last night they coached an Olympic medalist almost without realising it.
The pair were in the mixed zone, talking journalists through Bell’s road to success, when the men’s 4x400m set off with another of their athletes, Lewis Davey, running the third leg. He had not featured in the heats and was such a late call-up for the injured Sam Reardon for the final that his coaches did not even know.
Bronze for the boys meant Meadows and Painter’s M11 Track Club leave Paris with three medals, the same number as each of Belgium, Italy and Norway, and as many as France, Japan and Sweden combined.
Their preparation had been meticulous. In holding camp last month, they set Bell a 1200m time trial in which she ran a 61-second first lap, then slowed to 64, before picking up again, mimicking the rhythm of the race they expected to play out here. Bell’s opening splits last night? 60.4 and 63.6.
“That is our experience now,” said Meadows, a multiple major medalist during her own career. “We know how different races can be run. It’s not just run as fast as you can at training, it’s doing different tactics.”
Painter had been rightfully bullish before these Games in talking up Hodgkinson’s form and the idea that beyond them, she would have sights on the 800m world record, the longest standing of all track and field events.
Bell came in with no such expectation but the cat is out of the bag now.
“She’s run 3:52.6 [in Paris],” Meadows said, when asked what might come next. “I know 3:49.0 is a little bit in front of that but never say never for anything.
“She is 30 but Kelly Holmes was 34 when she did the double gold [in Athens in 2004],” Painter added. “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.”
Bronze in Paris, where Bell was born, marked a new high in a career brought back to life. Eyes - her coaches’ at least - now turn to LA 2028 and a return to California, the place it almost died.
