Josh Kerr’s Mile World Record Is Now Official

World Athletics ratified Josh Kerr’s mile world record on Monday, putting the 3:42.66 he ran at the London Diamond League on July 18 into the record book 114 days after the race. The Scot’s time is 0.47 seconds quicker than the 3:43.13 Hicham El Guerrouj ran in Rome in 1999, a mark that had stood for 27 years.

Kerr’s record went through in a single release with three others: Yomif Kejelcha’s 56:51 half-marathon in Buenos Aires, and two hurdles records from the Zurich Diamond League on Aug. 27, Alison dos Santos’s 45.80 in the 400m hurdles and Masai Russell’s 12.09 in the 100m hurdles. His wait fell between those of this year’s two biggest road records. Sabastian Sawe’s 1:59:30 marathon took 88 days to clear, and Jacob Kiplimo’s 57:20 half-marathon took 179.

Pacers Brannon Kidder and Zan Rudolf brought Kerr through 400m in 55.3 and 800m in 1:51.1, and he passed 1,200m in 2:46.39. By 1,500m he was at 3:27.62, already 0.17 seconds inside the British record of 3:27.79 he set winning Olympic silver in Paris in 2024, and he still had 109m to run. Yared Nuguse stayed with him until about 250m from the finish and came home second in 3:45.69.

El Guerrouj’s race in 1999 went through halfway in 1:51.58 and three-quarters in 2:47.91, according to World Athletics’ figures, which put Kerr ahead of the old record at every checkpoint. In the 27 years El Guerrouj held the record, only Jakob Ingebrigtsen had come within a second of it, running 3:43.73 in 2023.

Kerr went public with the attempt in March, calling it Project 222 after the number of seconds he planned to run, and named his target, his pacers and the venue months in advance. He is the first British man to hold the mile record since Steve Cram in 1985. Cram, Sebastian Coe and Steve Ovett passed it among themselves from 1979 until Noureddine Morceli took it in 1993.

London sat in the middle of the best season of Kerr’s career. He won the world indoor 3,000m title in Poland in March, then followed the record with Commonwealth Games mile gold in Glasgow and the Ultimate Championship 1,500m title in Budapest, and he is one of the nominees for World Athlete of the Year. Two days before the ratification, he was back in Edinburgh carrying the match ball out at Murrayfield in a Scotland shirt with 222 on the back.