Geordie Beamish’s route to the men’s 3000m steeplechase final at the World Athletics Championships in Tokyo was anything but straightforward.
With one lap to go in his preliminary heat on Saturday, the 28-year-old Kiwi clipped a barrier, tumbled to the track, and had his face stepped on by Canada’s Jean-Simon Desgagnés.
For most athletes, that would have spelled the end of their championship hopes. For Beamish, it was the beginning of one of the most remarkable comebacks of the meet.
Beamish had spent the race biding his time at the back of the pack before moving up with 450 meters to go. As he surged toward the front, disaster struck at the first barrier of the bell lap. Both he and Desgagnés went down, with photographers capturing the Canadian’s spike squarely connecting with Beamish’s face.
What happened next underlined Beamish’s reputation as one of the grittiest competitors in the sport. He was on his feet almost immediately, chasing down the field with little more than instinct to carry him forward.
“There was no thinking, just doing,” he told reporters afterwards, brushing off the incident as if it were nothing more than a misstep on a training run. By the 300-meter mark he was back in striking distance, and with his trademark finishing speed he tore past rivals in the final straight to cross the line in second in 8:27.23.
Desgagnés, who had fallen with him, initially missed out on qualification, but officials later advanced him to the final on appeal. Beamish, meanwhile, walked away with only “a couple of scratches” from the spike to the face and the relief of having avoided the cruel fate of elimination in a race he had controlled so well until the fall.
The performance capped a difficult season for the On Athletics Club runner, who has battled an ankle impingement and a femoral stress reaction for much of 2025.
He only resumed running on solid ground two months ago and admitted that it wasn’t until mid-July that he started to feel like himself again. Even so, he managed to run 8:13.86 at the Stockholm Diamond League in June to secure his qualifying standard, but Tokyo was his first race since then.
Beamish’s resilience should come as no surprise. A former world indoor 1500m champion, he has shown time and again that he can deliver on the biggest stages.
He finished fifth in the steeplechase at the 2023 World Championships in Budapest and has quickly established himself as a genuine contender in an event traditionally dominated by Ethiopia’s Lamecha Girma and Morocco’s Soufiane El Bakkali.
The men’s 3000m steeplechase final is scheduled for Monday afternoon in Tokyo (8:55 a.m. ET), where Beamish will line up against Girma, the world record holder, and El Bakkali, the reigning Olympic champion. If his heat was any indication, Beamish may need every ounce of that fighting spirit again, but after Tokyo’s wild preliminary, it is clear he has no shortage of it.
