Things have happened quickly for Georgia Bell since she returned to her first love but never quite as quickly as this.
On the final night of athletics here at the Stade de France, the 2008 English Schools champion, who watched the last Olympic Games from her sofa having long left track behind, did something extraordinary, shattering the national 1,500m record en route to the most remarkable Olympic bronze.
Bell’s time of 3:52.16 took another four seconds off a personal best that had already shed ten since the start of the year, the 30-year-old chasing home Australia’s Jessica Hull and Faith Kipyegon of Kenya, who broke the Olympic record to run 3:51.29 and take this title for an unprecedented third time on the spin.
At the line, having surged past Ethiopian Diribe Welteji in the final strides, Bell threw her head skywards in shock, seeking answers from the few clouds that hung above the city in which she was born. Her comeback story, which began only in 2022, had yet to reach a ceiling, but this was fantastical stuff.
“I can’t believe what’s just happened,” she said. “When I got back into athletics the goal wasn’t to make the Olympics. But it’s never too late to go back to something you enjoy.”
Bell had been a precocious talent, first honed on Perivale Park’s athletics track in west London after her parents moved back to the UK when she was two.
Injuries and the rigours of life as a full-time student athlete in the US, though, left her disillusioned with the game. When she stepped off the track after her final college race in Austin, Texas in 2017, she thought she was doing so for good.
And for five years, she was right, until a dash around the original Parkrun in Bushy led to a rethink, a modest summer season and then a phone call with Trevor Painter, the genius coach who, alongside wife Jenny Meadows, steered Keely Hodgkinson to gold at these Games.
“I started running when I was 11, so it’s not like I’m couch-to-5k and then Olympic medalist, though that is a better story,” she pointed out, so it’s probably right that we do here, too.
Bell left athletics in 2017, but not running entirely, taking up duathlon and winning a world age-group title as recently as April last year. Even now, her training is split, around 30 miles per-week on her feet and 100 on two wheels.
Still, it is some leap from there (Ibiza, since you ask) to here, and a medal in one of the hottest 1,500m races ever run. Teammate Laura Muir was fifth, also inside her own British record and more than a second quicker than she had run to take silver in Tokyo three years ago.
The Scot set out here to run her own race, not going with the brutal early pace in expectation that enough of those who did would pay. She was almost right, charging from last but one past tired women and to within sight of a medal rounding the home turn.
Crucially, though, she had expended energy bridging the gap to a leading pack that Bell had hung to from the start, tucked quietly on the inside, riding the danger line, saving every yard.
Bell said afterwards that she began to realise a medal might be achievable as she cruised through the heats and semi-final with little fuss at her first global championships outdoors. The clues though, were there earlier in the season: at the British Trials, she beat Muir, seven days before the Scot boosted the form with a new lifetime best; at the London Diamond League, she ran 1:56.28 for 800m, faster than Hodgkinson needed here for gold.
Certainly, though, this was not on the agenda when the summer began, and Bell slammed her laptop shut to start a sabbatical from her cyber-security job to that has only a few weeks left to run.
“Work said that even if you go to the Olympics and get a medal, we still want you back,” she explained. "When I left on May 1, I thought: ‘There’s no way I’ll win a medal, I’ll see you guys’.”
As things stand, Bell is still expected back online next month.
“I’ll probably have a chat with them now,” she laughed. “Things have changed slightly.”
You can say that again.
