Georgia Bell completes epic parkrun journey to 1500m Olympic bronze | Paris 2024 Olympic Games

Three years ago, Georgia Bell was watching the Tokyo Olympics like the rest of us: from the couch. She was 27, retired from serious athleticism, and the living embodiment of Marlon Brando’s Terry Malloy character in On the waterfront. Could be a contender? Bell was always on the edge until injuries intervened.

But when she watched Team GB’s Alex Bell and Katie Snowden, athletes she had competed against as juniors, something began to stir. A few months later, Bell went from that sofa to a 5k parkrun in Bushy Park. Slowly, she started running more. Racing more. And now, incredibly, she is an Olympic 1500m bronze medallist.

“When I started running again, the goal wasn’t to make it to the Olympics,” she said afterward. “That would have been really cool. I just wanted to get back to something I really loved.”

And now look. This was a medal won the hard way, as Bell clung for dear life on a brutal first lap run at a sub-four-minute-per-mile pace. But after clinging like a limpet to a pack of eight leading athletes, she was moving through the field when the bell rang.

On the final bend, it looked like the 30-year-old still had too much to do. But somehow Bell found a second and third wind to beat Ethiopia’s Diribe Welteji and take bronze. Her time? A stunning 3min 52.61sec – not only a new British record, but also an improvement on her personal best of 4:03 at the start of the year.

“When I saw them coming, 59.6, I was like, ‘Oh,’” Bell said. “I knew it was going to hurt. I just thought, ‘I know I can finish strong.’ So I just dropped off after that first lap and tried to sit on the train and not think about it too much.”

Team GB will never admit it, but some medals are just more inspiring than others. And it was a real This Girl Can moment to see an athlete who had stopped running on the track between 2017 and 2022 be brought back to life through a love of parkrun.

Kenya’s Faith Kipyegon won gold in 3:51:29, while Australia’s Jessica Hull took silver in 3:52.56. The other British rider in the final, Laura Muir, ran a highly commendable race to finish fifth in 3:53.37.

To make it even sweeter for Bell, she was actually born in Paris. “At the starting line, I said to myself, ‘I was born for this,’ in the sense that I was born in Paris 30 years ago. I just felt like I had nothing to lose, I didn’t feel any pressure. So I thought, ‘Just go for it and see what happens.’”

Some may be shocked by this result. But Bell always had talent. As a teenager, she was one of the best 800m runners in the country, with a personal best of 2min 3sec. However, after suffering repeated injuries while studying at the University of California, Berkeley, she decided to quit the sport.

“I’ve had a lot of stress fractures,” she said. “I was in California for two years and I think I was in a boot for about a year of that. I was just never fit for track. I’ve always had a good cross-country season or done cross-country and then I’ve always gotten hurt, both indoors and outdoors.”

But during lockdown, Bell began to take long bike rides and the occasional run without any problems. And by November 2022, she felt confident enough to reconnect with her old coaches, Trevor Painter and Jenny Meadows, who guided 800m star Keely Hodgkinson to an Olympic gold medal earlier this week. Would they be interested in taking her back?

They were. And under their coaching, supplementing 30 miles of running a week with 100 miles of biking, she has skyrocketed.

Bell’s progress was such that in March she ran for Great Britain for the first time, finishing fourth at the world indoor championships in Glasgow. Yet few expected her to win a medal in Paris. The bookies, not known for giving away money, gave her only a 20% chance in advance.

But on a dazzling final night at the Stade de France, where Emmanuel Wanyonyi took gold in the 800 metres and Jakob Ingebrigtsen won the 5,000 metres at breakneck speed, Bell once again exceeded all expectations.

Still, it wasn’t far off, as she finished fourth with 100 meters to go. “I thought I could do this,” she said. “I finished fourth at the World Indoor Championships and I know what that’s like. I just had to find something extra. And I did.”

What makes Bell’s achievement even more impressive is that she trained twice a day with her full-time cybersecurity job until May, before taking a sabbatical to prepare for Paris. Now, however, she had a dilemma.

“Employees would say something like, ‘If you go to the Olympics and get a medal, we still want you back,’” she confessed. “And when they said that on May 1, when the laptop closed, I thought I would never win a medal.

“I’ll probably have a chat with them now that things have changed a little bit,” she added with a smile. If Bell negotiates as hard as she runs, it’ll be an interesting conversation.