Tokyo 2025 Preview, #12: George Mills is racing the 5,000 meters in Tokyo

Tokyo 2025 Preview, #12: George Mills is racing the 5,000 meters in Tokyo 

The British distance runner, George Mills,  is just the unluckiest athlete.  At the Paris Olympics he had hardly started his race when he was tripped – “I was 10 metres into the race and there was like 3 of us that went down”.  He had to run the repechage to reach the final and the extra race in his legs put him at such a disadvantage that he was not in contention for a medal. In 2025, in the London Diamond league all was going well until he was tripped on the last lap. Immediately after the race he was taken to hospital.

He takes up the story: “I remember lying on the floor and was like, ‘how has this happened again?’ I went to the  Accident & Emergency department of a London hospital pretty much straight after. That evening I got an X-ray and my wrist was broken in a few places. They put a cast on. It was obviously a Saturday night, so nothing was open on Sunday. I stayed down in London to see a specialist on Monday afternoon. And he gave me a few options. He was like, OK, ‘we can either put it in a splint and leave it but you have a high chance that it’s going to heal weird. And later in life, you’re going to have a problem with your wrist. You can leave it in the cast or we can operate. And operation probably gives you the best chance of getting back to normal training straight away’. So that’s the option that we took”.

Speaking to the GB media about 4 weeks after the break he said that felt  pretty good. He had missed a little bit of training but had had a really good block in St Moritz adding “I’ve been able to have some really consistent weeks of training so me and the team are really happy with where we are at”.

He also explained how coming seventh in Zurich did not worry him: “I got a late call on the Monday night that there was a lane open. I was still in a very big block of training and didn’t have a race lined up before Tokyo. So we had to grasp that opportunity to actually go and put myself on the start line again, getting a feeling for it and me and my team were very aware of what could and couldn’t happen. Coach said to me, ‘look, you can do it, but I’ll tell you right now, you’re not ready to close hard because we’ve just been doing too much training’….