Three years ago, Georgia Bell watched the Olympic Games in Tokyo like the rest of us: from the couch. She was 27, had retired from her active sports career and played Marlon Brando’s character Terry Malloy in To the waterfrontCould he have been a contender? Bell was always on the fence until injuries got in the way.

But when she watched Alex Bell and Katie Snowden from the British team, who she had competed against as a junior, something started to stir. A few months later, Bell got off the couch and took part in a 5k parkrun in Bushy Park. Slowly, she started running more. Racing more. And now, incredibly, she has won an Olympic bronze medal in the 1500m.

“When I started running again, my goal wasn’t to compete in the Olympics,” she said afterwards. “That would have been absolutely crazy. It was just a return to something I really loved.”

And now look at it. That medal was won the hard way, as Bell fought for her life during the brutal first lap, run at sub-four-minute-per-mile pace. But after clinging like a limpet to a group of eight leading athletes, she was able to move through the field as the bell rang.

Coming around the final corner, it still looked like the 30-year-old had too much to do. But somehow, Bell found her breathing room and edged Ethiopia’s Diribe Welteji out of the bronze medal. Her time? A stunning 3 minutes 52.61 seconds – not only a new British record, but a further improvement on her personal best of 4:03 set earlier in the year.

“When I saw them come through with 59.6, I just thought ‘oh,'” Bell said. “I knew it was going to be painful. I just thought, ‘I know I can finish strong.’ So I just zoned out after the first round 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 seeing an athlete who had stopped running between 2017 and 2022 be revitalised by her love of parkrun was a real ‘This Girl Can’ moment.

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

And what makes it even better for Bell is that she was actually born in Paris. “On the starting line, I told myself that 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 had no pressure. So I thought, ‘Just do it and see what happens.'”

Some may be shocked by this result, but Bell has always had talent. As a teenager, she was one of the best 800-meter runners in the country, setting a personal best of 2 minutes and 3 seconds. However, after suffering repeated injuries while studying at the University of California, Berkeley, she decided to give up the sport.

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

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

They were. And under her coaching, which consists of supplementing 30 miles of running a week with 100 miles of cycling, she has made tremendous progress.

Bell’s progress was so great that she ran for Great Britain for the first time in March, finishing fourth at the World Indoor Championships in Glasgow. Even so, few expected her to win a medal in Paris. The bookmakers, not known for giving away money, gave her just a 20% chance beforehand.

But on a stunning final night at the Stade de France, where Emmanuel Wanyonyi took gold in the 800 m and Jakob Ingebrigtsen won the 5,000 m with flying colours, Bell once again exceeded all expectations.

Nevertheless, it was a close race, as she was only in fourth place 100 m from the finish. “I thought I could do it,” she said. “I came fourth at the World Indoor Championships and I know what that’s like. I just had to find something special. And I found it.”

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

“At work, they said, ‘If you go to the Olympics and win a medal, we still want you back,'” she admitted. “And when they said that on May 1, when the laptop slammed shut, I thought there was no way I was going to win a medal.”

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