Ex-Cal Runner Georgia Hunter Bell Wins Gold at European Championships

Two former Cal track and field athletes posted podium finishes this week at the European Athletics Championships at Birmingham, England.

Great Britain’s Georgia Hunter Bell, who completed her post-graduate work at Cal while competing a decade ago, won the 1,500 meters on Sunday, clocking 4 minutes, 7.78 seconds to win a tactical race by more than a second.

World-recordholder Mykolas Alekna of Lithuania, a four-time European champ in the discus, settled for second place on Wednesday, his first defeat of the season.

Hunter Bell, 32, won her first European title just three years after making a remarkable comeback in the sport that she left shortly after her two seasons in Berkeley.

Her breakthrough came at the 2024 World Indoor Championships Glasgow, Scotland, where she finished fourth. She had encouraged co-workers at her job at a cyber-security tech firm in London to tune in on the BBC to watch her compete.

“That’s when they really started to say, 'Ok, she is actually really good,’ “ Hunter Bell said recently in an interview with World Athletics. “And I think Steve Cram said on the commentary, as I came fourth, ‘Georgia Bell must know that she’s good enough to make the Olympics if she just quits her job and takes it seriously,’ and so that kind of did me a solid.

“So I spoke to them and asked to take a sabbatical with the plan to come back in September. I said, 'I don’t know if I’ll make the Olympics but I need to try; I need this time off to go to prep camps and do the work'. They were very supportive. They said, 'absolutely, go for it.’ “

Hunter Bell made the British Olympic team and won a bronze medal in the 1,500 at Paris in 2024. A year later, claimed the silver medal in the 800 at the World Championships at Tokyo.

Alekna, who earned his Cal diploma a year ago, wasn’t even expected to compete this summer. The 23-year-old suffered a complete tear of his left pectoral tendon while training in mid-March and underwent what was considered season-ending surgery.

He proved to be a fast healer and in mid-June returned to win a meet in Estonia. He followed that with a victory at the Prefontaine Classic at Eugene, then won the Lithuanian national championship on July 25 with a mark of 238-4 (72.65 meters), the longest in the world in nearly 20 years outside of Ramona, Okla., which provides throwers with significant but legal favoring winds.

It was at the Oklahoma site in both 2024 and ’25 that Alekna set world records, most recently with a heave of 247-11 (75.56).

Alekna came up short this week, losing to Slovenia’s Kristjan Ceh. Alekna thew 229-3 (69.89) while Ceh cracked 70 meters four times, winning with a mark of 237-10 (72.51), second-best of his career.

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