Tokyo 2025 preview #6, Georgia Hunter-Bell chooses the Women’s 800
Especially from a British perspective, the women’s 800 meters is a really intriguing race. Keely Hodgkinson, The 2024 Olympic champion is the outstanding favourite. Injured for most of this season she has only run twice but the recorded the staggering times of 1:54.74 and 1:55.69. Imagine what she could run if she was race fit!
What makes the rate even more intriguing is that Georgia Hunter Bell, 2024 Olympic bronze medalist at 1500 has opted for the 800m not the 1500m in Tokyo. Keely and Georgia are training partners with the same coach. I’m intrigued as to how they will prepare for the rest? Will they have lunch together, sit on the bus together on the way to the stadium and warm up together? Or will they blanked each other all day? I remember talking to Laura Muir and Jemma Reekie about the occasions when they we’re in the same race and had the same coach they told me that they would discuss their race plan with their coach individually but would not talk to each other about the race.
In a recent briefing for UK athletics writers, Georgia shared with us the process by which she had decided on the 800. She told us that she had considered seriously doubling up as well as sticking with the 1500 before opting just to do the 800m. (As an example of what I mean, when she spoke to us last week she was at a training camp – where her roommate was a certain Keely Hodgkinson!)
There was a real possibility of the double – remembering Kelly Holmes winning both in the 2004 Olympics. Georgia explained the doubts they had about the double: “Doing six races in nine days in the humidity with how late the races were as well, was a bit of a concern of mine as I was pretty sure that I wouldn’t sleep for the whole night after the 1500m final at 10pm by the time you have media, anti-doping, physio, all of that stuff. And that would really impact me for the 800, even if I tried my very best to be on recovery, it just logistically would be really tough”.
Having decided to choose one – which one? “The dilemma came from being “in a potential: “medal fighting position across both”. She admitted that there was no easy…
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