Counting Down Cal's Top-50 Transfer Athletes: No. 50 Georgia Hunter Bell

We rank the mid-career arrivals in Berkeley who have had the greatest impact on the Golden Bears

Georgia Hunter Bell | Photo by Kirby Lee

First in a series

The transfer portal era in college athletics seems like it’s been with us forever. Likewise, most fans can recall less turbulent times when transfers happened, they simply didn’t look like a stampede to the 1849 California Gold Rush.

We thought it was time to rank the best transfers Cal teams have attracted, most of them in recent seasons but also including a few OGs from yesteryear. 

We limited our ranking to transfers from four-year colleges.

Here is the first athlete in our countdown: 

50. Georgia Hunter Bell

Sport: Track & field

Arrival year at Cal: 2015-16

Previous school: University of Birmingham, England (She ran a best of 2:03.38 in the 800 meters at the 2014 England Athletics U23 Championships, a time she did not improve until 2024)

Contributions at Cal: 

— Bell came to Cal as a scholarship athlete in 2015-16 as a junior with two seasons of eligibility after running at the University of Birmingham in her home country.

— Partly because of injury, the middle-distance specialist never developed into an elite collegiate runner. She ran her best Cal times in the 800 and 1,500 meters as a junior, including 4:18.89 in the latter event that was the fastest on the team that season. She could not improve those marks in her final season of 2017.

— Bell had two largely uneventful seasons in Berkeley. She never made a race final at the Pac-12 meet or qualified to run at the NCAA championships.

— She retired from competitive racing after her two years at Cal, got healthy and several years later mounted a comeback that led to her status as a world-class runner in her early 30s. 

Standout performance: Her best race at Berkeley was a 2:08.22 clocking in the 800 meters at Tempe, Ariz., as a junior in 2016. That landed her fourth place at the Pac-12 vs. Big Ten Invitational, her mark still residing at No. 7 on Cal’s all-time list.

Impact on her team: — Bell’s greatest achievements came years after her time at Cal. She was a bronze medalist in the 1,500 meters at the 2024 Paris Olympics and a silver medalist in the 800 at the 2025 World Championships in Tokyo. Her times of 1:54.90 in the 800 and 3:52.61 in the 1,500 rank ninth and 12th, respectively, on the all-time world list. Bell’s 1,500 mark is a British record.

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