Jakob Ingebrigtsen Adds a Brussels 1,500m Before His Budapest Meeting With Josh Kerr

Jakob Ingebrigtsen will race the 1,500m at the Diamond League Final in Brussels on Friday, his third Diamond League start since Achilles surgery, and his last race before he lines up against Josh Kerr in Budapest on Sept. 13. FloTrack reported the entry on Monday.

He is in the field without having qualified for it. The circuit’s own standings place Ingebrigtsen 11th in the men’s 1,500m on nine points, level with Jake Heyward and Robert Farken but behind both on the tiebreak. Diamond League rules qualify the top 10 in the standings in the 1,500m and the longer events, with one further place per discipline available through a national or global wild card. Kerr is 12th on eight points and has not been announced for Brussels.

That leaves Sunday, Sept. 13 as the only date the two are due to race each other this year. World Athletics granted both men exceptional invitations to the 1,500m at the Ultimate Championship last month, against a stated limit of one per event, and grew the field to 13 places to fit them in. The last time they finished a 1,500m together was the Paris Olympic final on Aug. 6, 2024, Kerr second in 3:27.79 and Ingebrigtsen fourth in 3:28.24. Kerr has taken the mile world record since, running 3:42.66 in London in July.

Ingebrigtsen had Achilles surgery in February and did not race at all until Aug. 10, when he won a fourth European 5,000m title in Birmingham in 13:15.29, 0.31 clear of Germany’s Florian Bremm. “I doubted myself every day, and every minute leading up to the last lap,” he said afterward. “But I’m always hoping. You can only do your best and only prepare as well as you think you can, and in the past couple of weeks I’ve managed to do that.”

His two 1,500m races since have both ended outside the top three. At the Silesia Diamond League on Aug. 23 he was fourth in 3:31.19, 0.03 behind Cole Hocker and 0.42 behind the winner, Ethan Strand. In Zurich on Aug. 27 he finished fifth in 3:32.16, in a race Hocker won in 3:31.71 and in which Phanuel Kipkosgei Koech, Yared Nuguse and Anass Essayi also came home ahead of him.

King Baudouin Stadium held the 2024 Diamond League Final, and Ingebrigtsen won the 1,500m there on Sept. 13 that year in 3:30.37, beating Timothy Cheruiyot by 0.56 with Hocker third. He missed the 2025 final in Zurich. Neither of his times this season would have won that race, and his personal best of 3:26.73, run in Monaco in July 2024, is 4.46 quicker than anything he has produced in 2026.

The meeting is the 50th Allianz Memorial Van Damme and the first to be staged over two nights as the Diamond League Final. Organizers said on Monday that 40 reigning Olympic or world champions will compete across 32 events, Ingebrigtsen among them. Meeting director Kim Gevaert told La Dernière Heure that the anniversary edition carries a budget of 7 million euros, roughly double a normal year, and that she expects at least 30,000 spectators on each of the two nights.

In Budapest he has two finals rather than one. He is in the 5,000m as of right, the place reserved for reigning Olympic champions, and that race is on Friday, Sept. 11. The 1,500m final, with Kerr in it, starts at 6 p.m. on Sunday, Sept. 13, 48 hours later.