by Stuart Weir
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’. And I was like we can do it. Then he said we need to be very headstrong and not let this take away confidence and everything like that, so we were very aware. Obviously me being the athlete , I was like, ‘oh, I think I can close. I can do it’. But he was very realistic and clear. So it’s fine.”
He explained his reasoning for choosing the 5k in Tokyo as opposed to the 1500 or doubling up as he done in Paris: “We decided at the beginning of the year that we were going to focus on 5K at this world champs. Most of it being that I feel it’s my stronger event. My attributes and how we train, the stuff I’m able to do in training is probably more tailored to being successful over the 5K than the 1500 at this time. If the schedule had been the other way around, I would have loved to double up. We really just wanted to go all in on one of them and see how that pans out but I definitely want to double up in the future. But this time it felt like the right thing to”.
A factor in the decision was the experience of running 1500 and 5000 in Paris: “I was obviously very tired when the Paris 5K came around, but that was probably my stronger event last year as well. So I wasn’t able to show myself what I can do. So that’s led into the thinking that, OK, a lot of people are going to be doubling before – they’re going to have to carry that load from the 10K or the 1500, whereas I can now come into the 5K fresh”.
George is known for his monastic life style where he eats, sleeps and trains. He does not deny it: “I do like to live a very regimented lifestyle really applying myself as well as I can to see what my potential is”. His food is nutritious but often bland. He famously said “flavor does not make you fast!” The proof of the pudding will be in his running in Tokyo.
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