Peter Bol

Nagmeldin "Peter" Bol (born 22 February 1994) is an Australian middle-distance runner who competes in the 800 metres.

In 2013, Bol won the junior men's 800 m at the Australian Athletics Championships in a personal best time of 1:48.90.

In December 2015, he moved from Perth to Melbourne to train with coach Justin Rinaldi, who also coached joint national record holder Alexander Rowe.

He represented Australia at the 2016 Rio Olympics, placed fourth at the 2020 Tokyo Olympics and won the silver medal at the 2022 Commonwealth Games.

Born in Khartoum, Sudan, Bol's mother is Sudanese, and his father is from the region that is now South Sudan.

His family fled the Sudanese civil war when he was four.

In 2016, it was falsely reported that his family lived in an Egyptian refugee camp before emigrating to Australia.

Bol has stated that "despite what some people have said and written, we never lived in a refugee camp."

At the age of eight, Bol arrived in Toowoomba, Queensland.

He grew up in Perth and attended St Norbert College on a basketball scholarship.

In 2016, he ran two Olympic qualifying times (1:45.78 and 1:45.41) and was selected on the Australian team for the 2016 Rio Olympics.

At the Games, Bol finished sixth in his heat with a time of 1:49.36.

In 2017, Bol completed a degree in construction management at Curtin University.

At the 2017 World Championships in Athletics in London, he finished seventh in his heat in a time of 1:49.65.

He briefly worked as an engineer prior to signing an Adidas contract in 2018, and has since also completed a business course at the University of Melbourne.

Bol was a promising basketballer in Perth, Western Australia.

When he was 16, a teacher at St Norbert College suggested he try 800 metres running after a promising cross-country race.

In June 2018 at an IAAF meet in Stockholm, Sweden, he set a personal best of 1:44.56 in the 800 m defeating training partner Joseph Deng.

He was eliminated in the heats of his signature event at the 2019 World Championships held in Doha, Qatar, running 1:46.92.

At the Tokyo Olympics in 2021, Bol came first in his semi-final with a personal best time of 1:44:11.

He then came fourth in the tactical final, missing out on a bronze medal by 0.53 s. The winning Emmanuel Korir's time of 1:45.06 was slower than the time that Bol had accomplished in his heat.

He set a new Oceania and Australian record of 1:44.00 in June 2022 at the Paris Diamond League.

This was the third time he has lowered the national record in the 800 m. That year Bol finished seventh in his specialty at the World Championships held in Eugene, Oregon with a time of 1:45.51 before claiming the silver medal at the Birmingham Commonwealth Games in 1:47.66.

Bol is also the Claisebrook Cove parkrun course record holder, with a time of 14:40 over 5km.

In January 2023, it was announced that Bol had been provisionally suspended by Athletics Australia after failed out-of-competition doping test, with the test showing signs of synthetic EPO.

His suspension was lifted the following month because his B sample returned an atypical finding (ATF) for EPO, though Sport Integrity Australia continued its investigation.

In August 2023, Bol was officially cleared by Sports Integrity Australia.