On the morning of the London Diamond League last month, Georgia Bell woke up rather annoyed.
On sabbatical from her job at a cybersecurity firm, the 30-year-old’s mind was less on the afternoon’s run-out over 800m and more on the earning opportunity sailing by as the CrowdStrike IT outage plunged businesses around the world into chaos.
“She was furious,” Bell’s coach, Trevor Painter explained. “She said: ‘I’m losing so much commission because I’m not in work’. She was getting phone calls and had to deflect them to colleagues.”
By the end of the day, though, there was consolation in the form of a 1:56.28 clocking over two laps, the fourth-fastest ever by a British woman in what is not even Bell’s favoured event. Thanks to that performance, when last night’s Olympic 1500m final set off inside world record pace, she had conviction to latch on.
Painter is, alongside wife and former athlete Jenny Meadows, one half …