Jimmy Gressier Has Entered Both the 5K and the Half-Marathon in Copenhagen

Jimmy Gressier has entered two races at the World Athletics Road Running Championships in Copenhagen, and he goes into them from wildly different places. On the 5K entry list nobody has run faster than he has. On the half-marathon list, twelve men have.

The 5K goes off at 2:40 p.m. on Sept. 19, and the half-marathon starts at 9:45 a.m. the next morning, which leaves him just 19 hours and five minutes to recover from one and be ready for the other. And they are not remotely the same job. The first asks him to hold roughly 4:08/mile for a shade under 13 minutes, while the second asks for 4:33/mile, and to hold it there for an hour.

Now, the 5K is where the numbers are on his side. His seed time of 12:51 comes from his run in Lille in April, which set the European record and was within two seconds of Berihu Aregawi’s world best. The only other man in the field who has been anywhere near it this season is Addisu Yihune of Ethiopia, three seconds back at 12:54. After those two, there is a real gap, as nobody else entered has broken 13:06 all year.

The half-marathon list is where he slips down the page. Twelve men on it own a faster lifetime best than his 59:45, starting with Nicholas Kipkorir of Kenya on 58:08 and Andreas Almgren on the 58:41 European record, with Gideon Kipkertich Rono (58:38) and Tadese Worku (58:47) in there as well. Joshua Cheptegei, Daniel Simiu Ebenyo, Yemaneberhan Crippa and Conner Mantz are all ahead of him too. Not to mention, Gressier has not even raced 21.1K once this year.

None of this makes him a stranger to the distance, though. That 59:45 is the run that won him the European title at Brussels-Leuven in April 2025, and he won it by 1:23 over Norway’s Awet Nftalem Kibrab, which is not what anyone would call a close race. He has been to this championship’s half-marathon before, too, finishing fifth in Riga in 2023 in 59:46, 36 seconds behind the one and only Sabastian Sawe.

Riga also didn’t give anyone the chance to even try a double three years ago. That first edition crammed all six elite races into two and a half hours on a single afternoon, the men’s 5K at 12:15 and the men’s half-marathon at 14:15, and two hours is not enough time for anybody. Copenhagen has spread things out over two days, with the mile and the 5K on Saturday and both half-marathons on Sunday morning, and 10 athletes are taking on a double. Four of them picked exactly the pair Gressier did: Tharcisse Nizigiyimana of Burundi, Gawuga Daniel Abotsi of Ghana, Nubia de Oliveira Silva of Brazil and Rispa Cherop of Uganda.

The rest of his 2026 has been track and short road, and plenty of it has gone well: the 12:51 in April, a French 3,000m record of 7:28.67 in Montreuil in June, then bronze over 10,000m at the European Championships in Birmingham in August. His last global championship went rather better than that. In Tokyo last September, he sat and waited until the final 100m of the 10,000m, then went past two men and took the world title off Yomif Kejelcha by six hundredths of a second, in a race the humidity had kept slow nearly the whole way. “I said I would run here for a medal. On the home stretch, I moved to third, then second and then gold,” he said afterwards.

The 5K starts at 2:40 p.m. on Sept. 19. However that one goes, he is due back on a start line before 10 the following morning.