Merijn Geerts and Ivo Steyaert Stop Together After Breaking the Backyard Ultra World Record

When the bell rang for the 125th loop in Retie, Belgium, at 6 p.m. Thursday, neither Merijn Geerts nor Ivo Steyaert stepped forward to start it. The two Belgians had run 124 yards, about 516.7 miles (831.5 km), over five days and four hours, a new backyard ultra world record, and their decision to stop ended the last race still going at the Big’s Backyard Ultra World Team Championship.

The record they broke belonged to Phil Gore, who ran 119 yards at Dead Cow Gully in Queensland in June 2025. Dmitry Klimov reached 123 in Russia’s Leningrad Region this summer, but Lazarus Lake voided those results after video showed non-competitors on the course with the athletes. Geerts and Steyaert passed Gore’s mark shortly before 2 p.m. Thursday and kept going for four more hours. The results on the championship’s official live dashboard are still being checked, and the German results site Spoferan, which tracked the race closely all week, noted that the record has yet to be officially confirmed.

Because neither man completed a loop the other did not, the Belgian race has no winner. That is now the third team championship in a row in which the pair have stopped side by side: at 101 yards in 2022, the first time anyone had gone past 100, and at 110 in 2024 with Frank Gielen, who did not race this year. Steyaert, 56, was also Gore’s assist at last year’s individual world championship in Tennessee, where he lasted 113 yards. Geerts, 52, works as an inspector for Belgium’s food safety agency and Steyaert works in investment, the Belgian broadcaster Sporza reported.

Their teammate Bert Verbist, who went out at 86, told VRT on Thursday that the two were extraordinarily strong mentally and closely in tune with each other. “They really drag each other through,” he said. At one point the inflatable arch over the start collapsed before their 117th loop, and spectators held it up so the pair could set off underneath, according to L’Avenir.

The U.S. Wins the Team Title

Every country in the championship stages its own race with 15 runners, all starting at the same moment, and the national score is the total of every yard they complete. The United States won with 1,120, 51 ahead of Australia’s 1,069, and Belgium, the defending champion, finished third out of 67 nations with 1,058.

The American race on Lake’s original loop in Bell Buckle, Tennessee, ended Wednesday evening. Jon Noll, who ran 111 yards on the same course last year, could not finish the 107th loop inside the hour, and Mark Dowdle completed it alone to win with 107 yards, just under 446 miles (717 km). His previous best was 94, set only two months ago when he won the Last Soul Ultra in Germany.

The title came down to depth. Eight of the 15 Americans reached at least 80 yards, while Harvey Lewis, who matched Noll’s 111 at Big’s last year, went out at 83. Belgium had the two longest runs in the world but only one other runner past 80, Verbist, and its next best were Kenneth Vanthuyne on 78 and Benoît Badot on 72. Six more loops each from Geerts and Steyaert would have been enough to lift Belgium past Australia into second, and catching the U.S. would have taken them to about yard 155.

Sporza pointed out that the American total came on a much harder loop than Retie’s, one of the oddities of a championship that ranks national races run on dozens of different courses. Japan finished fourth with 1,038, and Britain fifth with 939.

As the U.S. national champion, Dowdle is in line for a place at next year’s individual world championship in Bell Buckle, which takes the top 50 national winners from this race.