For 27 years the men's mile world record stood untouched, a monument to Hicham El Guerrouj's 3:43.13 in Rome in 1999. On Saturday evening in London, Josh Kerr took it apart.
The British runner clocked 3:42.66 in the Emsley Carr Mile at the Novuna London Athletics Meet, a Diamond League fixture at the London Stadium. In doing so he became the first man in history to run the distance in under 3:43, shaving 0.47 seconds off a mark that had outlasted a generation of milers.
Chasing 222 seconds
Kerr had made no secret of his ambition. He built his season around "Project 222" – the number of seconds, three minutes and 42, that he believed would carry him past El Guerrouj. The plan demanded a brutal, sustained pace rather than a late kick, and for much of the race the American Yared Nuguse stayed with him. But Nuguse could not hold the closing tempo and crossed the line second in 3:45.69, itself a time that would have threatened the old record.
"It is very overwhelming," Kerr said afterwards. "There was a lot of hype. I am surrounded by amazing people, so I have continued to put the work in and I knew I had a 3:42 in me. I nearly lost it there at the end, but I got over the line."
The mile occupies a peculiar place in athletics. It is not an Olympic event – championships are run over 1,500 metres – yet no distance carries more history or romance, from Roger Bannister's first sub-four-minute mile in 1954 onwards. Records over it are rare and long-lived, which is part of why El Guerrouj's had come to feel almost permanent.
That sense of permanence is what Kerr overturned. A barrier that had stood since before many of today's runners were born fell in the space of a single, meticulously planned lap-and-three-quarters – and the mile, one of the sport's oldest tests, has a new fastest man.