Isabella “Bella” Guthrie: Australia’s Rising Hurdles Star and the Twin Who Found Her Own Lane
There is a story Isabella Guthrie tells about how she came to the 400 metres hurdles, and it starts, as so many good athletic stories do, with a sibling. Isabella — known throughout the Australian athletics community simply as Bella — is one half of a set of twins, and for years she and her sister Jasmin competed in the same events, over the same distances, for the same clubs, and under the same coach. The comparison was, by her own honest admission, difficult to navigate. Jasmin was simply faster over 400 metres. Always had been. And in the unforgiving arithmetic of competitive athletics, being the second-fastest person in your household is a precarious position.
So Bella changed the equation. She found the 10 barriers that would separate her event from her sister’s and made the 400 metres hurdles her own. By 2022, at age eighteen, she had posted the most world junior qualifying times in a single event of any athlete in Australia that year — a perfect 14 for 14 — and she and Jasmin had become only the second pair of twins to represent Australia simultaneously at an athletics global championship. The journey from that moment to her current status as a nationally ranked open hurdler, international representative, AIS ambassador, and quietly determined long-game athlete is the story of an athlete who learned to back herself when nobody else quite expected her to.
Northern Suburbs Beginnings
Isabella Guthrie was born on September 21, 2003, in New South Wales, Australia. She is a twin — older than Jasmin by the convention of birth order — and grew up in the northern suburbs of Sydney, a region that has produced a steady stream of NSW Athletics talent across the decades. She is a member of the UTS Athletics Club (also known as UTS Northern Suburbs), competing under the banner of the University of Technology Sydney’s athletics programme, and has represented New South Wales in national competition consistently from her early teens through to the present.
Her introduction to athletics came, as it does for hundreds of thousands of Australian children, through Little Athletics — the grassroots junior programme that runs Saturday morning meets across the country and introduces the events of track and field to children from as young as five. Bella began competing with Northern Districts Little Athletics from the Under 7 age group, running alongside Jasmin from the very beginning. She also played soccer from kindergarten and, for a time, touch football — the classic Australian childhood of multiple sports simultaneously, sorted out over time by talent and preference and the limits of the calendar.
The passion for athletics, however, was sparked by something more personal than Saturday morning ribbons. The Australian Olympic Committee’s profile of Isabella notes that she found her initial love for the sport watching events with her parents — and specifically, watching replays of Cathy Freeman’s iconic 400 metres gold medal at the 2000 Sydney Olympics. Freeman’s race remains one of the defining sporting moments in Australian history: an Indigenous woman winning gold in the 400 metres on home soil, in front of a nation watching with its breath held. For a young girl from Sydney’s north who would later discover her own family’s Indigenous heritage, the significance of that image runs deeper than simply an athletic inspiration.
A Dual Discovery: Little Athletics and the Hurdles
Through the Little Athletics years, Bella competed across a range of events — 400 metres, 200 metres hurdles, and 300 metres hurdles among them. Her results were promising rather than dominant. At the U13 State competition, competing for Northern Districts, she was a finalist in both the 400 metres and 200 metres hurdles but narrowly missed selection for the State team. She was good — clearly above average — but not yet the standout. Jasmin, meanwhile, was accumulating results and rankings that placed her firmly in the elite tier of her age group.
The turning point came during her U15 Little Athletics year, when two things happened in close succession. First, she competed on the 400 metres podium alongside Jasmin — a shared moment that reflects both how close in ability they were over the flat quarter-lap and how much Jasmin’s presence motivated Bella to push herself harder. Second, and more consequentially, she ran the 300 metres hurdles in a performance clocked at 44.10 seconds — a new Australian Best on record for the age group. The time announced clearly that whatever difficulty she faced clearing the comparison gap with Jasmin over 400m flat, over the barriers she was already operating in a different league entirely.
By the end of that same U15 season she had improved to 56.52 over 400m flat and was now also competing in the full 400 metres hurdles at junior level, with times in the low 60s. The trajectory was becoming clear.
High School and the LANSW Circuit: Building a Foundation
Bella attended Asquith Girls High School on Sydney’s Upper North Shore, where she represented her school, zone, region, and state in athletics throughout her secondary education. The school athletics pipeline in NSW runs from interschool competitions at the zone level through to the NSW Combined High Schools Athletics Carnival, where the state’s best secondary athletes compete across age groups, and Bella was a consistent presence at the senior end of that system.
One particularly notable result: as part of the Sydney North Opens 4×400 metres relay team at the 2018 NSW Combined High Schools Athletics Carnival, she took first place. Relay running — the demands of managing a baton change, running a calculated split, contributing to a team time under championship pressure — is a skill set that translates directly to the relay component of her later national team appearances, and its development through school and club competition in these years was formative.
Through the LANSW (Little Athletics NSW) circuit from 2016 to 2018, she accumulated state finalist and medallist results in the 400 metres, 200 metres hurdles, and 300 metres hurdles, building competitive experience across multiple disciplines at the state level. The LANSW Under 15 300m hurdles record she set at 44.10 — also the national Little Athletics record for the event — still stands as one of the most concrete markers of her early excellence.
The Junior National Era: 2020–2022
At age sixteen, Bella made the decision that would define the shape of her career: she stopped playing soccer and committed exclusively to athletics. It was a clear-eyed choice, made with the understanding that if she wanted to compete at the highest levels the sport could offer, the training demands required full focus.
Her transition to serious senior training came under the guidance of coach Angus McEntyre, an Olympic coach who is also a chiropractor and sports performance specialist. McEntyre’s squad trains at UTS Northern Suburbs and includes a diverse collection of athletes — sprinters, hurdlers, and javelin throwers, most famously the Olympic finalist and Paris Olympian Mackenzie Little. The environment of training alongside athletes of that calibre — Cameron McEntyre, Mackenzie’s brother and fellow squad member, was also part of the group — gave Bella an early exposure to what professional, high-level preparation looks like. She has spoken about how watching Mackenzie Little’s dedication made her want to bring the same intensity to the hurdles.
The 2019-20 summer season saw her return to competition in the 400 metres hurdles as an increasingly serious junior competitor. Then, as with all Australian athletics in the 2020 season, COVID-19 intervened. Events were cancelled mid-season, preparation was disrupted, and the competitive structure that junior athletes rely on to qualify for national championships disappeared for months.
When competition resumed in the 2020-21 Australian summer, Bella came back transformed. She ran 60.13 seconds in the 400 metres hurdles — a time that immediately established her as the national junior champion. She had run from the mid-60s into the low-60s seemingly in a single leap, a reflection of both her own physical maturation and the improvements Angus McEntyre had built into her technical approach. She won the ACT Junior Championships and placed third at the NSW Open Championships, giving her both a national title and a senior final appearance in the same season.
There was, however, one significant near-miss. The qualification standard for the 2021 World Athletics Under 20 Championships was 59.95 seconds. Bella’s 60.13 left her 0.18 seconds outside the cutoff — tantalizingly close, and just enough to keep her home as Jasmin travelled to the Gold Coast for her first international team appearance. Bella has spoken candidly about that moment. “I was very upset and angry that I didn’t make it,” she has said, “but it gave me this determination and drive to do it this year — to get that world junior qualifier and to be with my sister and friends in Colombia.” The frustration was real and so was the response to it.
The 2022 Season: Precision, Persistence, and Cali
The 2022 Australian summer was Bella Guthrie’s breakout season, and it was defined by one remarkable achievement above all else: of the 14 times she competed in the 400 metres hurdles, she broke the World Under 20 qualification standard every single time. Not sometimes. Not usually. Every time. It is an almost unheard-of level of consistency for any athlete at any level, let alone an 18-year-old navigating her first full season of high-level competition.
The NSW Athletics profile of her, written in the lead-up to the World U20 Championships, noted her as having “the most world junior qualifiers in a single event by any athlete nationwide” that season. The statistics confirmed it: she opened the season at 58.42 — a time that would have been the fastest ever run by an Australian junior in the previous decade — and continued improving, reaching 58.08 by March. Athletics Australia’s own preview of the World Championships noted that she sat 12th in the world U20 rankings with a personal best of 58.08, just 0.79 seconds off the world number one, and described her as “one of the most ‘qualified’ Australian athletes on the team in Cali” — a deliberate play on words that captured both the literal qualification record and the depth of her preparation.
At the Australian Junior Championships that autumn, she defended the national title she had won the previous year, claiming back-to-back Under 20 titles in the 400 metres hurdles to secure automatic selection for the World Athletics Under 20 Championships in Cali, Colombia. The selection also meant something beyond the individual result: she and Jasmin, who claimed her second consecutive national under-20 400 metres flat title with a personal best of 53.73, were selected together. They became only the second pair of twins to simultaneously represent Australia in athletics at a global championship. (The first had been at the 2015 Commonwealth Youth Games.)
Prior to the World Championships, the twins competed at the Oceania Athletics Championships in June 2022, fulfilling another international representative commitment as part of the Australian squad and gaining valuable experience of international competition before the main event in Colombia.
In August 2022, at Estadio Olímpico Pascual Guerrero in Cali, Bella competed in the World Athletics Under 20 Championships. She reached the semi-finals of the 400 metres hurdles — a result in keeping with her 12th-placed world ranking entering the event. And then, on the final day of the championships, she was part of Australia’s women’s 4×400 metres relay team that reached the final, where the Australians finished sixth. The relay time of 3:34.86, set on August 6, 2022, remains her personal best in the 4×400 relay. It was also, she has noted, the first time she had experienced international travel for athletics — the team flew to Colombia via a training camp in Miami, giving the young squad a taste of what high-performance international campaigns involve.
Moving into Seniors: 2023
The 2022-23 Australian summer marked Bella’s first full season competing as an open-grade senior athlete. The standard is sharply higher than under-20, and the adjustment showed in results that were competitive but no longer dominant. She appeared at the Sydney Track Classic in March 2023, finishing eighth in the open women’s 400 metres hurdles — a result that put her in the same field as Australia’s established international-level 400H competitors for the first time. The experience of being measured against that level, rather than her junior peers, was a necessary recalibration.
The 2023-24 season brought both an Australian national championship medal and her most significant individual performance to that point. At the 2024 Australian Athletics Championships in Adelaide, she finished third in the open women’s 400 metres hurdles with a time of 57.19 seconds — a new personal best, and by nearly a full second. The time was clocked on April 14, 2024, at the SA Athletic Stadium, and represents the most comprehensive individual time Guthrie has posted in her signature event. It placed her third behind national champion Sarah Carli (54.96) and Marli Wilkinson (56.11) — both of whom represent the very top tier of Australian 400 metres hurdles. A national championship bronze medal behind athletes of that standard is, for a 20-year-old making her mark at the senior level, a genuinely impressive result.
International Representation: 2024 Pacific Games and Oceania Championships
The 2024 season also brought two new international representative experiences. Bella was selected for Australia at the 2024 Oceania Athletics Championships in Suva, Fiji — her second international appearance in the Australian vest, following the 2022 World U20 Championships in Cali. At the Oceania Championships she placed third in the 400 metres hurdles, adding an international podium finish to her growing resume of senior representative results.
She was also selected to compete at the Pacific Games in 2023, adding the Solomon Islands Games to her international record, as noted in her Australian Olympic Committee profile — which was created in connection with that team selection. The multi-continental, multi-championship exposure across 2022, 2023, and 2024 reflects both the consistency of her performances and Athletics Australia’s confidence that she is a reliable contributor at the international level.
The AIS Share a Yarn Program and Indigenous Heritage
In 2025, Bella and Jasmin Guthrie were appointed as national ambassadors through the Australian Institute of Sport’s Share a Yarn program — one of Australia’s most significant athlete-led initiatives for First Nations connection in sport. The appointment acknowledged a journey that had been set in motion by a family medical crisis.
“A few years ago our mother was diagnosed with Leukemia and needed a Bone Marrow transplant,” Bella shared publicly when the appointment was announced. “As a result, we went on a journey that led my family to recently finding out about our Indigenous heritage. Consequently, we have been trying to fill the gap and learn as much as we can about our family’s heritage and culture.”
The combination of circumstances — a mother’s serious illness, the medical investigation that follows a bone marrow transplant process, and the genealogical threads it uncovered — led the Guthrie family to an understanding of their First Nations background that they had not previously been aware of. For Bella, whose earliest athletic inspiration came from watching Cathy Freeman’s 400 metres gold at Sydney 2000 — a race whose cultural meaning for Indigenous Australians went far beyond the stopwatch — the discovery added a new dimension to her own sense of identity in the sport. The AIS share a Yarn program, which brings together Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander athletes as ambassadors to strengthen cultural connections and support young First Nations people in sport, became a meaningful fit for both sisters.
A Busy 2025: FISU World University Games and Continued Development
The 2025 season was the most internationally active of Bella’s career since the 2022 World U20 Championships. She was selected for Australia at the 2025 FISU World University Games, held in the Rhine-Ruhr region of Germany in July. Enrolled at the University of South Australia — a shift from the Newcastle University enrolment she had in 2022 when she began part-time studies in Sports and Exercise Science — she met the FISU academic eligibility requirements and competed in the 400 metres hurdles alongside fellow Australian hurdler Alesha Bennetts.
At the FISU Games, held across venues in the Bochum-Wattenscheid area, she competed in both the 400 metres hurdles and as part of Australia’s mixed 4×400 metres relay squad. The mixed relay team — comprising Thomas Reynolds, Isabella Guthrie, Terrell Thorne, and Hayley Kitching — finished fifth in the final with a time of 3:20.51 on July 24, 2025. The mark stands as Guthrie’s personal best in the mixed relay event and her most recently recorded individual relay performance at the international level. The FISU Games also gave her the experience of competing in a significant multi-day international athletics programme with a large Australian squad — the biggest team Australia had sent to a World University Games.
Also during 2025, she competed at the Sir Graeme Douglas International in New Zealand, placing third in the open 400 metres hurdles, and won the NSW Open Championship in the 400 metres hurdles. At the 2025 Australian Open Championships she placed fourth in the 400 metres hurdles. In the flat 400 metres, she clocked 54.20 seconds at the AIS Athletics Track in Canberra on January 26, 2025 — a personal best at that distance that underlines her versatility as a quarter-lap athlete and demonstrates how the flat speed work she does alongside the technical hurdles preparation is paying dividends across both events.
The 2026 Season
The 2025-26 Australian summer season has seen Bella competing on the domestic circuit. On January 31, 2026, she ran 59.38 seconds in the 400 metres hurdles — a mid-season time that placed her within the expected range as she builds toward the peak-season Australian Championships. She was scheduled to compete at the Hobart Track Classic in late February 2026, one of the stops on Australia’s summer track circuit, as she continued accumulating competitive miles ahead of the 2026 campaign. The Commonwealth Games — now scheduled for Glasgow in 2026 — represent one of her stated major goals, and qualifying for a Commonwealth Games team in the 400 metres hurdles would require improvement toward the 56-second range to be reliably competitive for selection.
Coach, Club, and Training Philosophy
Angus McEntyre has been Bella Guthrie’s coach throughout her senior career. McEntyre, who is also a practicing chiropractor and sports performance coach, operates a squad at UTS Northern Suburbs that spans events from sprints through hurdles to javelin — an unconventional combination that raises eyebrows but has produced results. The squad culture centres on mutual dedication and high expectations, and McEntyre’s presence at every race and training session has been something Bella has cited as fundamental to her development.
“My Coach Angus McEntyre has pushed me to believe in myself and my potential,” she said in 2022. “He has been at every race and training session pushing me and encouraging me to be the best athlete I can be and wouldn’t be at the stage I am now if it wasn’t for him.” The relationship has endured through multiple championship cycles, which itself speaks to both the consistency of the coaching programme and the loyalty Bella brings to the athlete-coach partnership.
The squad environment is one she has described as tight-knit and mutually reinforcing. Training alongside Mackenzie Little — whose own arc from talented junior to Paris Olympian in the javelin provided a visible template for what sustained development can achieve — gave Bella a daily model of what professional athletic commitment looks like. “Mackenzie is so confident and dedicated to her training, which has obviously paid off because she is doing so well,” she said. “It makes me want to be like her and bring that to my 400m hurdles.”
The Twin Dynamic: Jasmin Guthrie
No account of Bella Guthrie’s career is complete without an acknowledgement of Jasmin — the twin who is simultaneously her closest supporter and the most persistent point of comparison in her athletic life. Jasmin is an elite 400 metres flat athlete (personal best 53.73), currently part of the Australian 4×400 relay squad at the senior level. The twins study the same Sports and Exercise Science degree, train under the same coach, and have represented Australia together at international championships.
The comparison between them has been, by Bella’s own account, both the greatest challenge of her career and one of its most powerful motivating forces. “A big challenge has been competing against my twin sister, and having that comparison between us both, with people placing high expectations on my performance due to my sister winning, and expecting me to do the same,” she said in 2022. “It used to place a lot of stress on me trying to live up to the expectations that people had for me as I never used to achieve as well as my sister.” The resolution she found — not trying to match Jasmin at her event, but finding the hurdles as her own domain — is one of the more instructive lessons her career offers. The competitive pressure of having a world-class sibling to measure yourself against is, in her case, a genuine part of what drove her from a 62-second hurdler to a 57.19 national finalist.
Athletic Idol and Future Goals
Bella Guthrie has named American hurdler Sydney McLaughlin as her athletic idol — the world record holder in the 400 metres hurdles whose combination of blistering speed, technical precision, and public kindness represents a model that Bella explicitly aspires to. “She has achieved such amazing results as a 400 hurdler which I aspire to become,” she said in 2022. “She is such a humble and down to earth athlete who lets her running do all the talking. Her dedication to her athletics and spreading love and kindness to the world is so inspiring.”
Her stated goals are unambiguous in their ambition: the Commonwealth Games, the World Athletics Championships, and the Olympic Games. The Commonwealth Games in Glasgow 2026 represent the nearest achievable step on that ladder, and the Olympic Games — specifically Los Angeles 2028 — loom as the horizon ambition that shapes her longer-term planning. Given that she ran 57.19 as a 20-year-old at the national championships and has consistently improved across each competitive cohort she has entered, the trajectory toward sub-56-second territory is a realistic one if her development continues as it has.
She has been candid about the financial realities of her sport. Her ASF fundraising page and Australian Sports Commission profile both note that training and competing are self-funded, that multiple international selections have required her to raise money independently, and that external sponsorship would make a meaningful practical difference to her ability to pursue her athletic goals. It is a situation common to the mid-tier of Australian elite athletics — athletes good enough to represent the country multiple times but not yet on a full Athletics Australia high-performance funding arrangement — and her willingness to name it directly reflects the same honesty she brings to other aspects of her career.
Personal Bests and Career Records
- 400 metres hurdles: 57.19 — April 14, 2024, SA Athletic Stadium, Adelaide (Australian National Championships)
- 400 metres (flat): 54.20 — January 26, 2025, AIS Athletics Track, Canberra
- 4×400 metres relay: 3:34.86 — August 6, 2022, Cali, Colombia (World U20 Championships final)
- 4×400 metres relay (mixed): 3:20.51 — July 24, 2025, Lohrheidestadion, Bochum, Germany (FISU World University Games final)
- 4×100 metres relay: 47.06 — March 19, 2022
- Little Athletics 300m hurdles (U15): 44.10 — Australian Best on Record / NSW record (standing)
International Representation Summary
- 2022 Oceania Athletics Championships (team appearance pre-World Championships)
- 2022 World Athletics Under 20 Championships, Cali, Colombia — 400m hurdles (semi-finalist); 4x400m relay (6th in final, 3:34.86)
- 2023 Pacific Games, Solomon Islands — 400m hurdles
- 2024 Oceania Athletics Championships, Suva, Fiji — 400m hurdles (3rd)
- 2025 FISU World University Games, Rhine-Ruhr, Germany — 400m hurdles; mixed 4x400m relay (5th, 3:20.51)
Social Media and Sponsorship
Bella Guthrie is active on Instagram under the handle @bellaguthrie_, where she documents her training, competition appearances, and broader life as a student-athlete. Her World Athletics profile (athlete code 14765492) is maintained at worldathletics.org under her full name Isabella Guthrie, and currently lists her at #114 in the world women’s 400 metres hurdles ranking. She is a New South Wales Institute of Sport (NSWIS) scholarship athlete and a 2025 ambassador for the Australian Institute of Sport’s Share a Yarn program. Her training and international competition are self-funded, and she has an active Australian Sports Foundation fundraising page for those wishing to support her athletic goals.
Isabella “Bella” Guthrie (born September 21, 2003, New South Wales, Australia) competes for UTS Northern Suburbs (UTS Athletics Club) in the 400 metres hurdles and 400 metres. She trains under coach Angus McEntyre and is registered with World Athletics (athlete code 14765492).
