A British Runner Broke A 27-Year-Old Mile World Record

In late March 2026, British runner Josh Kerr posted to social media publicly announcing that he intended to break the world record for the mile on July 18th at the Wanda Diamond League meet in London. The record he was targeting had stood for 27 years: Moroccan runner Hicham El Guerrouj ran 3 minutes and 43.13 seconds in Rome in 1999, a time so fast that it had survived every serious attempt for nearly three decades. His coach Danny Mackey acknowledged at the time that calling your shot that early was, in his words, a little silly, given how much could go wrong. On July 18th, at London Stadium, Josh Kerr ran 3 minutes and 42.66 seconds, breaking El Guerrouj's record by nearly half a second and becoming the seventh British runner in history to hold the mile world record. He finished three seconds ahead of the second-place finisher, American Yared Nuguse. Kerr described feeling overwhelmed by the amount of support and the weight of having called it so far in advance, and said simply that he was surrounded by amazing people and stayed consistent.

The attempt, run under the name Project 222 after the number of seconds Kerr needed to hit or beat, was the product of months of careful planning and high-altitude training in Albuquerque, New Mexico, with custom spikes and a speed suit made by his sponsor Brooks Running, and two training partners assigned specifically to keep him on record pace through the race. Kerr is 28 years old, grew up in Edinburgh, holds an Olympic silver medal in the 1500 metres from the Paris Games in 2024, and was the 2023 world champion in the same distance. He researched the history of British mile world record holders before announcing the attempt and found that there had been six before him: Roger Bannister, who ran the first sub-four-minute mile in 1954; Derek Ibbotson; Sydney Wooderson; and Sebastian Coe and Steve Ovett, who traded the record three times over the course of ten days in 1981. Kerr said the prospect of becoming the seventh, and doing it on British soil, carried a particular weight that made the timing and location feel exactly right. The crowd at London Stadium, aware of what they were watching, was on its feet for the final lap.

Source:https://www.npr.org/2026/07/18/nx-s1-5899057/josh-kerr-mile-world-record-time