The 17-year-old Phoebe Gill on her breakthrough year, how she is keeping herself grounded and what she plans to make of her first Olympic experience in Paris
For Phoebe Gill, life has changed almost as quickly as the amount of time it takes her to cover two laps of an athletics track. Since chopping almost four seconds from her personal best, breaking a European Under-18 800m record that had stood for 45 years and clocking an Olympic qualifying time of 1:57.86 in Belfast in May, the 17-year-old’s world really has sped up in many ways.
Performances such as the run that won her Commonwealth Youth Games gold last year had already marked her out as one to watch, but that day in Northern Ireland was on a different level entirely. It didn’t take long for the attention levels to start ramping up.
Cut to late July and she is sitting down to speak with a group of British athletics writers as the senior UK champion and wearing the Team GB kit she has been issued with after that title-winning run in Manchester booked her ticket to the Paris Games.
Gill still admits there’s an element of disbelief about the situation in which she now finds herself. This is her latest stop on a round of media interviews, while the ink has barely dried on a kit contract signed with Puma and her sporting prowess has also resulted in being able to meet one of her heroes, the two-time Olympic champion Dame Keely Holmes.
Given that she is the youngest British track athlete to compete at an Olympics for 40 years, it would have been understandable if the St Albans athlete’s head had started spinning.
As she contemplates what lies ahead of her in Paris, however, she is nothing but cool, calm and very collected, displaying a maturity well beyond her years. Life outside of the athletics bubble has been very good at keeping her grounded, too.
She is in the first year of sixth form, with A-Levels in biology, chemistry and maths to worry about, while a week of work experience immediately after becoming the UK champion certainly brought a healthy reality check with it.
“Life has definitely changed this year but school has been really good in grounding me between the hectic things going on,” she says. “[For work experience] on the Monday after the British Champs I was back at my old primary school helping the reception class. Teaching isn’t something I want to get into but I really wanted to get back to my old primary school memories because I had a lot of fun there. Being with…
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