The morning of the biggest race of his life, Josh Kerr sought out his parents and fiancee to tell them something that would have done absolutely nothing for their jangled nerves. ‘If I don’t win this one, I’ll never win one,’ he said.
It was Wednesday 23 August 2023, and Kerr was a matter of hours away from the World Championships 1500m final, a race that would see him go up against the strongest milers in the world and – in Norway’s Olympic champion Jakob Ingebrigtsen – a resounding favourite, considered as a contender for the greatest of all time, at least in his own eyes.
‘They looked at me and were like, “Yeah, that makes perfect sense,” but internally, they would have been s******* themselves,’ says Kerr. ‘That’s an insane thing to say. They must have thought, “Why on earth have you told us this?”’
‘But that’s how I felt,’ he adds. ‘I knew I’d left no stone unturned. I’d got the sleep right, the nutrition right, I’d done all the mileage and the sessions. I’d thrown everything at
it. Everything. And I was ready to go to war. It was a very calming feeling.’ He laughs. ‘Just not especially for them.’
What followed on that warm summer’s evening in Budapest has passed into British middle-distance folklore. The Edinburgh man, eyes masked by Josh taking the win in the 1500m final at the 2023 World Championships, tracks Ingebrigtsen through the brisk early laps, his long-striding fluidity the equal of the Norwegian’s metronomic, forward-leaning gait.
Through the bell, they’re first and second, with the Olympic champion glued to the kerb and winding it up, Kerr on his shoulder and the pack clinging on behind. With 200m to go, Kerr kicks. It’s a move of such schoolboy obviousness as to carry the weight of surprise. The Norwegian is momentarily unsettled but fights to keep the inside lane.
Running shoulder to shoulder, the pair continue to battle round the bend and into the final straight. Then, slowly, agonisingly, the slenderest of leads opens up. A flicker of concern registers on Ingebrigtsen’s famously inscrutable demeanour, followed by something akin to panic. ‘With 50m to go, I just knew I had him,’ recalls Kerr. ‘But, god, did it feel like a long way to that line.’
Nearly a year on, the extraordinary climax of that race has lost none of its raw drama and intensity. Kerr straining across the line to complete a final-lap split of 52.77 run mostly in lane two – then running onwards to celebrate with his euphoric, emotionally drained retinue. Ingebrigtsen ambling around the track, ashen faced and disorientated like an earthquake survivor.
It took the Norwegian several days to find the right words and when he did they were characteristically churlish. Asked after his consolation win in the 5000m whether it would be a big deal to race Kerr again, he snorted derisively, stared down his interviewer and said simply ‘no’.‘If you stumble and fall,’ he said, alluding to his claims that he’d been nursing a sore throat on the night, ‘someone is going to win the race. He [Kerr] was just the next guy.’
It was the sort of witheringly contemptuous remark – one from an oeuvre so sizeable it has spawned ‘best of’ montages on YouTube – that Kerr could watch on repeat ahead of the two athletes’ hotly anticipated rematch at this summer’s Paris Olympics, for limitless extra motivation. But the more time you spend with the poised Scot, the more you realise something: he really doesn’t need any.
His confidence may not be expressed with the sneer or smirk of the generational athlete he hopes to dispatch on the biggest stage of all, but it runs every bit as deep – bolstered by him calling out an indoor two-mile world-record attempt three months ahead of the Millrose Games in New York in early February, and then delivering; following this up with another world title in the 3000m at the World Indoor Championships in March in front of a rapturous home crowd in Glasgow’s Emirates Arena; then breaking Steve Cram’s 39-year-old British mile record at the Diamond League meet in Oregon in May, and once again getting the better of Ingebrigtsen in the process.
Those landmark performances, plus an absurdly fast 61:51 half-marathon PB in a rare foray into the distance in San Diego just before Christmas (putting him in the top 25 quickest Britons of all time), were all greeted with restraint. ‘I was pleased,’ he tells me. ‘But I wasn’t out celebrating any of those moments, really – because I knew there was another one coming. A bigger one.’
And that moment is Tuesday 6 August this year – the Olympic 1500m final in Paris: an occasion the 26-year-old has had ringed in his diary for more than a dozen years, since he calculated that it was the Games that offered him the highest probability of success. His date with destiny.
As with Budapest, he’s leaving himself precisely zero room for failure. Sharing a statement that from the lips of his self-reverential rival would be greeted as nothing short of cocksure, Kerr says, ‘I don’t believe anyone’s good enough to beat me on 6 August.’
Lighting the flame
The making of a world champion is an inexact science. Reach into the backstories of 100 elite sportspeople, and their formative years will be a disorderly mix of privilege and adversity, desperation and serendipity. But all are likely to share one thing: the proximity of positive role models. Josh Kerr, in his family of four, had three of them.
His dad, John, played professional rugby for Scotland A and the Scotland sevens team – a quick and elusive centre winger who mixed it with the likes of the Hastings brothers. His mum, Jill, is a physiotherapist with her own practice, and played various sports ‘to a very high level’, according to Kerr. And older brother Jake – 18 months Kerr’s senior – plays for Premiership rugby team the Bristol Bears and was capped for Scotland in the Six Nations in 2019.
‘It didn’t matter if it was tennis or rugby or running or swimming or whatever,’ remembers Kerr. ‘We all just loved competing. The four of us would try to see how much better we could get each year.’ In their household, professional sport wasn’t a vague aspiration, it was a defined career path the brothers saw in practice every day. ‘For us, it was like,“We can make this our job one day,”’ he says. ‘And so we really doubled down.’
When Kerr was nine years old, the two brothers attended a training camp at Meadowbank Stadium in their home city of Edinburgh. A coach from Edinburgh Athletics Club was sufficiently impressed to invite them to join the club’s middle-distance group. Beating each other was the early motivation, but as Jake began to focus more on the oval-ballgame, Kerr was left with a dilemma.
‘For me it came down to rugby or running,’ recalls Kerr. ‘I kind of had to make a decision between the two. I love rugby as a sport, and I still watch it today, but it was pretty obvious, I think, from an outsider’s perspective, which one I should drop.’
Today Kerr’s meticulously honed physique is far more suited to miles than scrums and mauls – though Jake isn’t averse to joining his younger brother for the odd run-out. ‘Jake has got the biggest engine that anyone of 117kg has ever had,’ says the now Seattle-based Josh. ‘If he’s ever in the US, he’ll come on a training run and all my teammates are like, “What on earth is going on?” You’ve got this big, 117kg guy breathing down their necks.’
As studs gave way to spikes for Josh, who was it that he was seeking to emulate: any formative Olympics or World Championships memories? ‘I remember being on a school holiday in 2008 and everyone was piling into this sports bar to watch the [Beijing] Games, just going mental. That was the first one that I was probably old enough to really understand,’ he says. He recalls the ‘double excitement’ as he puts it – for the event itself and for the realisation that his chosen sport meant that one day he could be there. Kerr’s Olympic flame had been lit.
The Scottish schools and national age-group victories started to stack up, and such was the positive reinforcement being drip-fed into him by his family at home, there was almost a sense of inevitability to them, he recalls. ‘I’ve always known I was a world-class runner – or had all the capabilities of being the best in the world – because my parents told me that every day. When we were training, my dad would say, “You’re gonna write this in your book one day.” These are the conversations I was having with my parents and my brother on a daily basis.’
One seminal victory stands out, however: the European Junior Championships in Sweden in 2015. ‘It was my first GB vest and I came in ranked sixth or seventh in the 1500m. But I won because I think my mind was just in a better place than everyone else’s on that start line. I knew how to handle different pressures and scenarios that came to me that day. That’s when I realised I have the tools to be really good.’
With his single-mindedness, sharply analytical brain and dry wit concealed just below a phlegmatic exterior, Kerr brings to mind another Scottish world-beater: Andy Murray.
Like his compatriot, he departed Scotland at a precociously early age, driven by an instinctive recognition that comfort zones do not breed champions. For a 15-year-old Murray, it was the Sánchez-Casal Academy in Barcelona; for Kerr, two years older when he left, the University of New Mexico(UNM) and arid, high-altitude Albuquerque. How did that come about? It’s a fair old distance – geographically, culturally, meteorologically – from Edinburgh all the way to the American south-west.
The answer lay in the vision and discernment of the university’s track and field coach, Joe Franklin (he left his post at UNM in June 2023). ‘I’d been reaching out to US colleges for months, sending emails, receiving knock-backs,’ recalls Kerr. ‘There was a lot of “come back in a year’s time”. I wasn’t a sexy enough candidate. And then Joe sent me an email saying, “We want you. You win races – and that’s a skill that not a lot of athletes have and you can’t teach. So we’re going to bring you here, develop you and we’re going to get you to win bigger races.”’
Kerr vindicated Franklin’s faith with his European title. ‘The fun part was, as I did my lap of honour, I saw all these US coaches that had turned me down,’ recalls Kerr.‘They were like, “Come on, sign with Oklahoma State” or wherever. And I said, “No, I’m going to be a Lobo [the name for UNM’s sports teams]. I have a coach who believes in me.”’
Keeping the faith
The belief of coaches is a recurring theme in the Kerr narrative. Franklin first and, subsequently, the coach to whom he’s so closely affiliated today that they share a pronoun, ‘we’, in nearly all of Kerr’s interviews: the long-standing head of Brooks Beasts Track Club (an elite post-collegiate team based in Seattle), Danny Mackey.Mackey – stocky, intense, with a master’s degree in biomechanics and exercise physiology and a black belt inpeople skills – first saw Kerr in action in his freshman yearat UNM, where the Brooks team stage their altitude camps.‘Josh was pretty over running weight, let’s put it that way,’ Mackey told Athletics Weekly in October last year. ‘But I saw him do a 300m rep and I said to Joe, “Who’s that?” He said, “He’s run 3:44 and we got him from Scotland.”’
Mackey tracked Kerr’s progress from afar, as Kerr enjoyed his breakout season the following year, 2017, winning the NCAA (National Collegiate AthleticAssociation) indoor mile and outdoor 1500m titles. When another NCAA title followed in 2018, Nike and other big brands began to circle. But Kerr was persuaded to sign with Brooks following a pitch by Mackey that was asaudacious as it now looks prescient. It was a six-year plan, leading all the way to Paris, and it pledged two major deliverables: ‘world champion’ and ‘Olympic champion’.
What makes their partnership so effective is a shared ethos centred on rigour and teamwork. Kerr praises Mackey’s humanity and proven ability to ‘peak’ his athletes at the right times; Mackey admires his protege’s coachability, self-flagellating work ethic and, particularly, his ability to muck in. Even as he proceeded to pull up trees on the world stage – sixth in the World Championships in Qatar, the year after signing with Brooks; bronze in the Tokyo Olympics in 2021, as a 20-year-old Ingebrigtsen stormed to victory; then that world title in Budapest in 2023 – Kerr has remained one of the guys. ‘You’d have to watch an entire practice [session] to work out he was top dog,’ Mackey told the Citius Mag podcast in September.
A far cry from the simmering antipathy of the Seb Coe and Steve Ovett days, the Scotsman’s relationship with his fellow British contenders is strong. Jake Wightman, a former Edinburgh AC teammate whose world 1500m title in 2022 blazed a trail for Kerr to follow, celebrated deepinto the night in Budapest with his old mate, along with Neil Gourley, the British indoor 1500m record holder, who was ninth in the same race. It would be cool, says Kerr, if one daythe trio could achieve a podium clean sweep.
For that heady night in Budapest, Mackey was cruelly absent – holed up at home in Seattle with his baby daughter, Isla, following a nightmarish few months in which he lost his wife to suicide. That Mackey had the courage and devotion to return to his role following the appalling loss in March 2023 is ‘the reason I’m sitting in front of you today as a world champion’, Kerr said graciously at the time.
The two don’t always see eye to eye, however. The build-up to Glasgow was one example. Mackey wasn’t 100% convinced it was the right move in the fastidiously calibrated road map to Paris. Kerr felt it was too good an opportunity to miss. Plus, he had a sizeable itch to scratch. As a 19-year-old, he’d made his first World Championships team in London in 2017, and bombed; knocked out in the heats and forced to watch, frustrated, from the sidelines. ‘I saw some phenomenal British athletes competing really well in front of a home crowd, and I thought, “When that time comes again, I’m going to be ready and I’m going to put on a show for some of the best fans in the world,”’ he says.
He won the debate with Mackey and, true to his word, in early March he returned to the UK to compete in the 3000m– opting for the longer distance rather than jeopardising the place of the qualified British athletes in the 1500m. Arriving in Glasgow for the race, in which he’d be going up against Olympic 10,000m champion Selemon Barega, he felt invincible.‘I kind of started to get that feeling,’ he says. ‘And when I start to get that feeling, it doesn’t go away. I can’t explain it. I was 100% certain no one was going to beat me.’ On that six-lane, dual-coloured track in the Emirates Arena, cheered to the roof by its partisan crowd, the Scotsman was imperious. ‘It was so special. I got a world title in front of a home crowd. And I’ll remember that for the rest of my life.’
His was a personal mission, but the Glasgow appearance– and, indeed, the Millrose Games world record attempt –showed a marketing man’s flair for good old-fashioned hype.Nothing will deflect him from his overarching mission, it’s clear. But if Kerr can make some headlines along the way, put bums on seats and accrue some exposure for a sport that– outside of the major championships – often finds itself tapping forlornly at the window of global sport’s gilded mansion, then he’s absolutely going to do that.
‘I think we can have more excitement, and that comes with press conferences, with interviews, with behind-the-scenes stuff,’ he says – adding that it’s ‘on the athletes’ to show more of their personalities. Since Budapest, under the guiding hand of London-based Forte talent management, he’s evolved in that respect. He eschews platitudes and is happy to put in a shift at the ‘content’ coal face. He airs views on everything from the abuse of Therapeutic Use Exemptions, or TUEs, in elite athletics(too much of it) to money in the sport (too little of it). Viahis Instagram account (86,600 followers and growing),he’s willing to share personal moments, such as his engagement to long-term girlfriend Larimar Rodriguez, a resident doctor at the University of Miami and a track and field star who he met at the University of New Mexico,when they both graced the track in the cherry-red and gold of the University’s ‘Lobos’ athletics team.‘I kind of just let people know what I think and what my true opinions are,’ Kerr explains. ‘And if that annoys some people or creates good races or good rivalries, then I think it’s a positive thing.’
Pushing the needle
Which brings us back, somewhat inevitability, to his Norwegian adversary – his Scandi bête noire. Not since those fractious days of Ovett and Coe in the early 1980s has there been such off-track spice to middle-distance’s blue riband event. When the subject is raised Kerr smiles; neither relishing it nor unwilling to discuss it. Post-Budapest barbs have included Kerr labelling Ingebrigtsen ‘insecure’ and an ‘attention seeker’. ‘Flaws on the track and flaws in the manners realm’ was how he described him in The Guardian Josh taking the win in the 1500m final at the 2023 World Championships.
Ingebrigtsen, meanwhile, greeted Kerr’s indoor two-mile world record of 8:00.67 with haughty indifference. Had he been there, he said, he’d have beaten Kerr ‘blindfolded’.To be fair, the stats corroborate this; in June 2023, theNorwegian obliterated the outdoor world record for the distance, running an astonishing 7:54.10 in Paris and taking more than four seconds off a mark that had stood for 26 years. Perhaps, deep within themselves, they might concede that each is good for the other. Ingebrigtsen would see the mere suggestion that he has a rival as an outrageous affront, but then that holds its own motivational value. In any case, Kerr has a suspicion that his nemesis’s prideful panto-villain pronouncements and sulky superciliousness are perhaps more knowing than the Norwegian lets on. ‘I think he outwardly shows a lot of confidence and I think it’s massively entertaining for people,’ says Kerr.
When Kerr speaks to us for the second time over the course of four months for this story, it comes just days after the surprise announcement by Lord Coe, World Athletics president, of plans to introduce $50,000 (around £39,000) of prize money for gold medal winners in Paris. Kerr has found a powerful ally in Coe, a two-time winner of the Olympic medal that the Edinburgh man cherishes above all others.When Kerr was snubbed for the shortlist for the BBC’s Sports Personality of the Year Award in December, Coe tweeted, ‘No Josh Kerr on the list, are you having a laugh #SPOTY?!’
Are they similarly aligned over these prospective payments, which are set to be extended to silver and bronze from the 2028 Los Angeles Games? ‘It’s definitely the right direction,’ says Kerr. ‘Obviously back in 2021 [when he won bronze in Tokyo], I got a whopping $0, so any progress is progress. I think they’re starting to see now that we’re able to create revenue. But we need to keep pushing.’
Away from the major championships, he’s an advocate for a global circuit – not dissimilar to the breakaway league that four-time Olympic gold medallist Michael Johnson is developing with ‘athlete-centric commercial solutions’ specialist Winners Alliance. Johnson is drawing inspiration from the National Basketball Association and NationalFootball League; Kerr references tennis or Formula One.
‘Imagine having 12 of the best 1500m runners and having six races between them in six different countries,’ he says.‘We go at it and the top person with the top points ends up winning the overall world tour or whatever. That would be exciting. Just slap a bunch of logos on us and athletes are going to make good money to be able to support themselves.’
Logo officialdom is a persistent bugbear of Kerr’s. He thinks it’s ‘crazy’ that athletes can’t represent more than one brand on the track and that the size of their logo is so strictly regulated – so much so that he once had his forcibly duct taped before a race. Would he perhaps go the whole hog and do a Linford Christie – imprinting your sponsor’s logo on your torso. Kerr laughs. ‘Actually I had one conversation[with his sponsor] where I said, “How much would you pay me to legally change my surname to Brooks?”’ he says. ‘We were at a happy hour, we’d had a few beers and I don’t think they were willing to put out a number at that point.’
Win on 6 August and perhaps they would be. And Kerr is convinced he will. As with Budapest, the build-up has been brutal – and brutally effective. Working in tight union with Mackey, he’s had months of purgatorial reps and monastic self-denial. No one will be fitter or more focused coming into Paris. And as Kerr has been showing since that European Junior Championships win all those years ago as a 17-year-old, when it slowly dawned on a succession of American college coaches that they’d made a truly world-class blunder, the biggest stage is where he comes alive.
‘I’ve never been someone that’s able to go out and run 3:28, 3:29 multiple times in a season,’ says Kerr. ‘But I’ve run a season’s or personal best in the final of every major championship since 2019. So I feel like I’m good in big moments. When it’s all over, that’s how I want to be defined – as a major championship performer.’
Add Olympic gold to his multiple world titles and world record and no one would dream of disputing it. At which point, Josh Kerr, who Ingebrigtsen dismissively labelled as ‘just the next guy’ at the 2023 World Championships, will unquestionably be the main man.
