Georgia Bell was Great Britain’s 1500 metre Olympic bronze medallist at Paris 2024, but just 12 months ago, with Paris nothing more than a distant dream, Georgia was crowned the Duathlon World Champion in the 30-34 age category at the Ibiza Multisport World Championships. This week, with the Townsville 2024 edition of the annual festival of all things multisport getting underway, the World Triathlon Podcast welcomes her to reflect on a whirlwind year, flying from an Age-Grouper on the blue carpet to the Stade de France and the biggest stage in the world, and why her love of cycling is here to stay.
“It was a bit of an interesting transition, I guess, from triathlon to track. I was originally a track runner when I was younger and then through COVID took up cycling, um, and just realized that you could do triathlon without the swim. Which is very appealing to me… I don’t love swimming.”
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Georgia Bell was born in Paris, lives in South London, and was the UK’s top 1500m runner at the age of 15. After earning a track scholarship to University in California, she moved to the USA to pursue her dream on the NCAA circuit, but fell foul of a volume of training and racing that compounded emerging injury problems, causing her run times to dip along with her love of the sport. Soon the spikes were hung up, possibly for good.
It was back in Paris, via an Ibiza Multisport World Championship title, that her destiny on the track would be complete. After scoring a first sub-4-minute time at the pre-Olympic Diamond League meet in the French capital, she then smashed that time once again to win Olympic bronze on the final Saturday of the Games in a packed Stade de France. And the woman who still has ‘duathlete’ proudly in her Instagram handle is in no doubt where some of the secret powers came from.
“When you’re out cycling on the roads with a group of people, you don’t want to get dropped because you could be on a three, four hour ride. You just have to kind of hang on, even though you’re in pain, and that’s a good kind of mindset.”
“I honestly just think there’s got to be a connection between the kind of results that I’m running now… like I’m running faster than I’ve ever run… and I’ve been doing three, four years of cycling now, doing a hundred miles a week. I’d never done that in the past, so I do just think it’s where all my endurance comes from and it’s allowed me to stay injury free. Cycling will never go out of the program and, yeah, I’m very happy about that. I love cycling.”
As well as discovering cycling, Georgia rediscovered her love of running during the pandemic, clocking some rapid Park Run times and getting back in touch with Trevor Painter, her coach from the early days as an exciting teenage talent who trains a group in Wigan that includes Keeley Hodgkinson, the Paris 2024 800m gold medallist.
“The big goal for me was to try and make the (GB duathlon) team last year for the world champs and I was really happy to get the win on the day for my age group. I did not think that I would be at the Olympics back on the track a year later.”
“Afterwards it was kind of like, ‘okay, what, what now?’ Then I started training a little bit more with the group that are based in Manchester, with Trevor Painter’s group… and that gave me an indication that I was getting quite good at it, being able to hang on to Keeley Hodgkinson made me think that actually, perhaps I should focus a little bit more time looking at the track.”
Anyone who witnessed that remarkable final, in which Bell had to run 3m52s to win the bronze, knows they saw something truly special. But it looks like the prospect of a return to the world of multisport and future duathlon competition isn’t out of the question.
“It just goes to show when you have these athletes in the race and these huge stadiums and great atmosphere… you can run so much faster than you ever thought was possible. Now the calendar for running next year gets interesting because they’ve pushed back the worlds to be middle to end of September… So I am actually looking to do some cycling in the middle. Like I’d like to potentially do a duathlon again. But I also would love to climb some more of the stages of the Tour de France… And best of luck to everyone competing this week in the age group championships. Have a lot of fun.”
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