SAINT-DENIS, France — At 8:50 p.m. local time Tuesday night, Norway’s Jakob Ingebrigtsen and Josh Kerr of Great Britain and Scotland, two men bound by history, world record-setting talent, ambition, and genuine acrimony toward the other, will line up along with 10 other runners on the top of the backstretch of Stade de France’s lavender-colored track for the start of the most anticipated Olympic Games 1,500-meter final in nearly a half-century.
A year of world records and traded increasingly pointed and personal insults by Kerr, the reigning World 1,500 champion, and Ingebrigtsen, the defending Olympic champion, have attracted a worldwide level not seen since Great Britain’s Steve Ovett and Sebastian Coe met in the 1980 Olympic final in Moscow, this showdown’s epic status confirmed in Paris by half of the 20th century’s greatest rivalry.
“A race for the ages,” said Coe, who won the first of his two Olympic 1,500 titles in Moscow and is now president of World Athletics, the sport’s global governing body.
A race whose expectations its stars have not only embraced but gone out of their way to fuel.
“Just expect one of the most vicious, hardest 1,500 meters that the sport has seen in a very long time,” Kerr said after Sunday’s semifinal in which he and the Norwegian finished shoulder to shoulder staring each other down through the closing meters, appearing to exchange words a few strides from the finish line, as if it was a heavyweight boxing match weigh in. Ingebrigtsen won the heat in 3 minutes, 32.38 seconds, with Kerr eight-hundredths back, both men running comfortably.
“I’m ready to go after it, I think we all are,” continued Kerr, 26, a former NCAA champion at New Mexico. “There has been a lot of talk over the last 12 months, even two years. I’m just looking to settle that a little bit on Tuesday, and give my best performance.
“I’m here in my fifth major championship final in a row. I don’t miss these because I’m good at what I do. And I’m gonna show everyone.”
Ingebrigtsen, 23, seemed to own the future of global middle-distance running after winning the Olympic 1,500 gold medal at just 20 three years ago in Tokyo with Kerr taking the bronze medal.
Ingebrigtsen was upset by Great Britain’s Jake Wightman, Kerr’s friend since boyhood, in the 2022 World Championships in Eugene, Oregon.
But it was Kerr’s upset of Ingebrigtsen at last summer’s Worlds in Budapest that seemed to get under the Norwegian’s skin.
“If I hadn’t run in the final, he would probably have won,” Ingebrigtsen said. “That’s how I see the race. Obviously, if you stumble or fall then someone is going to win the race and he was just the next guy.”
A few days later Kerr responded before Zurich’s Weltklasse meet.
“Emotions are high in the media,” Kerr said. “I know he wanted the 1,500 title and the 5,000-meter field seemed to not realize he’d run three rounds and kind of wanted to make it slow for some reason. But he can be disrespectful to me, that’s fine. I still have the World Championship gold medal and I’m going to be the world champion for the next two years regardless of his comments. Obviously, I don’t love disrespectful comments and I’ve worked hard to get into this position and I beat him on the day. But if that’s the kind of route he wants to go down, that’s fine with me, I’m kind of unbothered by it.”
The insults continued to fly during an offseason when Ingebrigtsen went on his honeymoon and recovered from an Achilles tendon injury.
“I do think people will start realizing that a little bit now, but I don’t think he will, because the ego is pretty high on this one,” Kerr said during an interview on the “Sunday Plodcast.” “He was paced in 2021 for his Olympic gold medal by (Kenya’s Timothy) Cheruiyot. … If you really look at it, he doesn’t win a lot of non-paced races. I would love for him to be listening to this.
“There was a question asked to him earlier on in the season: ‘Are you worried about the world championship not having a pacer and all this stuff?’ And his answer was, ‘When the pacer drops out, I am the pacemaker.’ And I was like, ‘Oh, you have, you have no idea. You’ve won so many races, you’ve run fantastic all season – you must be surrounded by so many yes-men that you don’t realize that you have weaknesses.’ I think that was part of his downfall. If he doesn’t realize that he’s got some real major weaknesses, then he will not win the 1,500-meter gold medal next year. I’m okay with that.”
Kerr also made a lot of noise on the track, shattering four-time Olympic champion Mo Farah’s 9-year-old world indoor 2-mile record with an 8:00.67 clocking in New York and then ran away with the World Indoor Championships 3,000 title in Glasgow.
Ingebrigtsen, who holds the world outdoor 2-mile record at 7:54.10, was unimpressed.
“I would have beaten him in that race, blindfolded,” he said of Kerr’s world record during an interview with Norway’s TV2.
Then earlier this month, he seemed to respond to Kerr’s comments about Ingebrigtsen’s Olympic victory.
“I think some people are just (jerks) and being idiots,” he said during an interview on the “Ignite” podcast. “At the end of the day, for me, it’s all about myself and the sport of running and trying to be as good as I can be. I think I am friends with people who share the same thoughts and chase the same goals as me. There are some people that don’t do that.
“I’ve won it before so I don’t know what’s all the fuss about,” he continued laughing. “It’s quite exciting. Obviously, the Olympic Games in Tokyo was very different to the upcoming Games in Paris with no spectators, a lot of testing and rules with COVID. But at the same time, it was a unique possibility for us as athletes to really focus on the competition itself and the things that mattered. There was never that much outside of going to the track to train and prepare and also to go into the competition to compete because we weren’t allowed to do anything else. If I don’t get injured and I don’t get sick, I think it’s going to be a walk in the park.”
More recently Ingebrigtsen said the Scot is “known as the Brit who never competes,” to which Kerr responded, “We ran against each other earlier this year, and we saw how it went.”
Kerr knocked off Ingebrigtsen at the Prefontaine Classic’s Bowerman Mile in Eugene in May, breaking Steve Cram’s 34-year-old British mile record with a world leading 3:45.34 clocking with the Norwegian finishing in 3:45.60.
The pre-race press conference the day before was nearly as entertaining as the race.
“I wouldn’t say this is a counseling session so I don’t know if I can explain our relationship,” Kerr said when asked about the status of their relationship. “But we’re fierce competitors, we both want to be the best in the world and that’s not going to change regardless of comments or how the media spins things or how the media takes things out of context. It’s going to create some fantastic races.”
Said Ingebrigtsen, “If we take a step back and look at it and it’s good for the sport and blah, blah, blah and whatever. I think all these different things that cause people to create hype or just engagement or causing attention, that’s definitely positive for all of us and for the sport and all involved.
“But it’s definitely a balance.”
Neither man, however, has shown any signs of stepping back in Paris.
“I’ve worked my whole career to be in this position – sitting in front of you as world champion and GB captain for one of the best teams in the world,” Kerr said. “Anyone can write whatever story they like about us, but I’m really enjoying my life right now.”
Coe welcomes the headlines, nastiness and all.
“This is probably not a friendship made in heaven,” Coe said. “That doesn’t bother me either. We know we want that kind of thing in the sport. So it really could be a race for the ages.”
So Tuesday night, Ingebrigtsen and Kerr will step up to the starting line, step into the golden moment they created in words and deeds, a race the world has waited more than 40 years for, 3 minutes and 30 seconds from history.
“I want to be involved in the 1,500 meters in one of the best eras of all time,” Kerr said. “That’s going to create rivalry and big battles, and hopefully that’s going to create headlines. I’m cool with it, I’m going to continue to be myself. I’m here to run fast for 1,500 meters and bring medals home to my country. That’s the plan.”
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