Josh Kerr Breaks the Mile World Record, Then Calls His Bonus ‘Appalling’

Josh Kerr ran the fastest mile in history in London on July 18, then took issue with the reward for it: a world-record bonus worth less, in today’s money, than the one paid to the man whose record he broke.

Kerr, a 28-year-old from Edinburgh and the 2023 world 1,500m champion, ran 3:42.66 at the London Diamond League, the sport’s top annual circuit of one-day meets, to become the first man to break 3:43 for the mile. He took 0.47 seconds off the 3:43.13 that Hicham El Guerrouj of Morocco set in Rome in 1999, one of the longest-standing marks in the sport at 27 years. The time is subject to the usual ratification by World Athletics.

Kerr is the first Briton to hold the mile record since Steve Cram in 1985, and only the seventh British man to break it since record-keeping began in 1913. Yared Nuguse of the United States finished second in London in 3:45.69 and Jake Hayward of Britain third in 3:46.73. Kerr sat behind pacemakers through the early laps, then pulled clear over the final 400 meters as a full house at London Stadium roared him home.

The reward was $50,000, the standard World Athletics bonus for a world record at a Diamond League meeting. Kerr, speaking to the Times, called it “a ridiculous number.” “To get the same amount 27 years later is appalling, not to sound greedy,” he said, noting that El Guerrouj had banked the identical figure in 1999.

The numbers bear that out. Adjusted for United States inflation, the $50,000 paid in 1999 would be worth about $99,000 today, so the award has lost close to half its value even as the record it rewards became harder to reach.

The sum also looks modest beside what World Athletics, the sport’s global governing body, pays elsewhere. A world record set at one of its own championships is worth $100,000, double the Diamond League bonus. Kerr could not have earned that for this particular run, since championships contest the metric 1,500m rather than the mile, but the mismatch is the point: identical difficulty, very different reward depending on the meet. World Athletics will stage its new Ultimate Championship, which carries the $100,000 bonus, in Budapest in September. The Diamond League figure, meanwhile, has sat at $50,000 for years, even as the circuit raised prize money for winning individual events this season.

Kerr has made the argument before. After winning the 3,000m at the 2024 World Indoor Championships in Glasgow, he questioned the $40,000 that came with the title. The gap has widened as private circuits push into the sport: Grand Slam Track, the breakaway series founded by former American sprinter Michael Johnson, paid Kerr $100,000 for a single win in Miami in 2025, twice what breaking a 27-year-old world record earned him.

Kerr, an Olympic silver medalist over 1,500m in Paris, said he now means to chase the world record at that distance, a mark he believes is within reach, and has spoken of running the London Marathon later in his career.