Georgia Bell lay on her back on the purple Stade de France track, staring into the Parisian night. All around her was the bedlam of a packed stadium that was rocking in the immediate aftermath of an Olympic final but, for a few minutes, she needed to find stillness. Breath was difficult to come by and exhaustion had taken over. It was precisely how she had hoped to feel.
“I couldn’t get up,” she recalls. “I really wanted it to be [the case that] I gave it absolutely everything and really pushed myself harder than I ever had. No matter what the result was, I wouldn’t look back and be like: ‘Could I have tried a bit more? Could I have dug a bit deeper?’
“I pulled absolutely everything out of me that I had, physically and mentally, that day. I remember just lying on the track, hearing the craziness around me, but knowing that you’ve done it and how fast you’ve run… that memory will stay with me forever. I shared it with 80,000 people but I was just taking a moment to adjust.”
There was much to adjust to. Bell had just become the British 1500m record-holder and an Olympic bronze medallist to boot. It was a glorious high to a truly extraordinary year into which little more could have been packed.
As if some kind of confirmation were needed, a recent Instagram post from the 30-year-old laid the facts of her outdoor season bare. While numbers don’t always tell the full story, in this case they go a long, long way to confirming just how much progress she has made since returning to the sport at which she excelled as a youngster and reconnecting with her old coach Trevor Painter and his wife Jenny Meadows in early 2023.
The 800m and 1500m at last month’s Diamond League final represented Bell’s 26th and 27th races of 2024. In total, she raced 10 times indoors and 17 out. That indoor season saw her become the national 1500m champion before narrowly missing out on a medal at the World Indoor Championships in Glasgow.
Heading outdoors, there were five key goals – to break four minutes for 1500m, break two minutes for 800m, win a medal at the British Championships and European Championships and make the British Olympic team.
Bell can now look back at a summer that saw her break that four-minute mark five times, including the 3:52.61 that she could barely comprehend at the time and makes her the fastest British woman in history over 1500m. There were also five sub-two clockings for 800m, featuring a blistering 1:56.28 at the London Diamond League.
Jessica Hull, Faith Kipyegon and Georgia Bell (Getty)
The European Championships? She won 1500m silver. The British Championships? Gold. That performance in Manchester was the run that led to her eventually stepping on to an Olympic podium. Another key stat is that she has only been a full-time professional for four months, a sabbatical from her corporate job in cyber security having now turned into a complete career change.
As she picks through it all, though, Bell maintains that none of it would have been possible without a stroke of fortune at the very start of the year, in the form of the Sparkassen Indoor Meeting in Dortmund.
“Running a British record and getting an Olympic medal, that’s obviously the big ticket moment,” she says. “But, for me, the race that I think was the most crucial, and one I’m the most proud of, was that race in January in Dortmund.
“It was a bronze level indoor meet that I got a cancellation spot to and I got that spot from emailing the Meet Director and just trying to hustle my way in.
“I had no agent, no brand working with me at this point, and it set the tone for the whole season. The goal going in was to get 4:06 to try and make it to the World Indoors. I just went in so determined, on a mission to run that time, and ended up running 4:03. I smashed past what we were expecting and that set the tone of ‘we really don’t know where I am, so there’s no point putting limits on what I can aim for’.
“I kept carrying that into every single race during the whole year and then that kicked off a series of events that got me a contract, that got me an agent that, ultimately, has changed my life totally. That was a race where I was just backing myself with the support of Jen and Trev and I think that was the one that changed everything.”
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