Jakob Ingebrigtsen Calls Out Josh Kerr for Missing the European Championships

Josh Kerr ran the fastest mile in history in London on July 18, 3:42.66, taking 0.47 seconds off Hicham El Guerrouj’s 27-year-old record and collecting $20,000 just for winning the race itself, before any bonuses. Two weeks later, in Glasgow, he won a Commonwealth title that paid him nothing at all. The European Championships, the continent’s biggest title, began in Birmingham on Aug. 10 with a 500,000 euro ($578,500 USD) prize pool, and Kerr did not enter.

Jakob Ingebrigtsen won the European 5,000m title in Birmingham on Aug. 10 in 13:15.29, his first race in 11 months after Achilles surgery. It was his seventh senior outdoor European title, a record for the championship, but his post-race remarks were somewhat unexpected.

Asked by the BBC about the athletes who stayed away, he said: “So I definitely think it is ruining the sport if we are not participating. We all have different plans, but I could never see myself in that position.” Within a day, the story had settled into a familiar shape: the circuit outbids the championship, so the championship loses. And the first half of that holds up. But the second doesn’t hold up against what Kerr actually did this season.

European Athletics will distribute the 500,000 euro pot as 50,000 euros ($57,850 USD) each to the ten leading performances of the championships, so a European title on its own actually guarantees a champion nothing. A Diamond+ discipline win at a Diamond League meeting pays $20,000, and the mile was a Diamond+ discipline in London. One Diamond League mile pays a miler more than a European title is contractually worth.

The sport’s own arithmetic agrees with the money.

Under World Athletics’ 2026 ranking rules, a win at the Olympics or the World Championships scores 260 placing points, a Diamond League win 140, an area championship such as Birmingham 120, and a Commonwealth title 100. World Athletics rewrote those numbers this season, cutting placing scores in every category in favor of result scores, and a Diamond League win fell from 200 points to 140. The governing body has spent the year telling athletes that how fast they run counts for more than who they beat, and Ingebrigtsen is arguing the opposite in the same summer.

What the ledger does not explain is Kerr, who has not skipped championships this year. He regained the world indoor 3,000m title in Torun on March 21, and he won the Commonwealth mile on Aug. 1 in 3:54.12, nine days before Birmingham opened, so he’s clearly involved and active on the championship circuit.

The order of Kerr’s summer therefore runs: the $20,000 race, then the championship worth nothing, then the 500,000 euro pool he declined, with the lowest ranking score of the three attached to the title he chose. “Of course I am going to go for times, but I don’t think you have to do one or the other,” Ingebrigtsen told BBC Sport. On the evidence of the season, Kerr has never argued otherwise.

Three facts stand where a motive would go.

Kerr was born in Edinburgh and ran for Scotland in Glasgow at a Games that almost didn’t happen, staged on a reduced scale after Victoria walked away. His record also carries no senior European Championships appearance, indoor or outdoor, his only European medal a 1,500m gold as a junior in 2015. And there are no outdoor World Championships this year, which makes Birmingham the highest-ranked title available to him and lends force to Ingebrigtsen’s complaint. Kerr has not given a reason for missing it.

A professionalizing circuit has visibly outbid the federation calendar this season, and the sport has no settled answer to it. World Athletics began paying Olympic prize money in Paris in 2024, $50,000 for a gold medal, over objections from the summer Olympic federations that a price should not be put on an Olympic title. Circuit money pays better and holds worse. Grand Slam Track ran a single season, filed for Chapter 11 owing athletes about $7 million, and claims that they have returned roughly 70 percent of it. Kerr took six figures in prize money at the league’s Miami slam in 2025, from the league that then went bankrupt.

Ingebrigtsen has the better of one argument. Birmingham was the best title on offer this year, and he came to it 11 months after surgery and won it. “We have these championships for a reason, and that is for the best athletes to compete, that is the whole point,” he told BBC Sport. The complication is that he entered only the 5,000m and left out the 1,500m, the event he and Kerr most often go head-to-head. No reason was given for that either. Both men made selective choices about the same championship, and their simple disagreement is over which title counts.

Beijing hosts the next outdoor World Championships from Sept. 11 to 19, 2027, the first global title on offer since Kerr’s record, and the first test of whether his calendar changes when there is one to win.