There was no assault on Mo Farah's one-hour world record at the Memorial Van Damme on Friday night. Jimmy Gressier, the world 10,000m champion who had been billed since the spring as the headline act of the meeting's 50th edition, withdrew from the attempt on 20 August, a decision confirmed at the time by his entourage and his shoe sponsor Kiprun to the French outlet Stadion. The news did not travel widely outside France, and previews of the Brussels final, including our own on Thursday, continued to list the record bid on the programme. It was not there, and Running Lookout is happy to correct the record.
The target would have been the 21.330km that Farah covered in 60 minutes on the same King Baudouin track in September 2020, a distance that requires an average of roughly 2:49 per kilometre for the full hour. Gressier's credentials for it were real. In April he ran 12:51 for 5km on the roads of Lille, a European record and two seconds outside the world best, and his winning half marathon at the European Running Championships in Brussels and Leuven came at almost exactly the pace Sabastian Sawe held for his marathon world record. The hour record is nonetheless an unusual and unforgiving event, and preparing for it in the same block as a championship 5km was always a stretch.
The reason for the change is the World Athletics Road Running Championships in Copenhagen on 19 and 20 September, where the 5km is scheduled for 2:40pm on the Saturday. The French federation named a 13-strong team for Denmark on Thursday, led by Gressier alongside Etienne Daguinos and Agathe Guillemot, and it is clear that a second world title over a distance he has made his own is worth more to the 29-year-old than a track record with limited championship currency. He finished fifth in the half marathon at the inaugural championships in Riga in 2023, running 59:46, and has since become the best European in history over 5km on the road.
What Brussels lost is considerable. The hour record was the only distance event on the Friday programme that had not already been decided by Diamond League points, and Farah's 2020 run, staged behind closed doors during the pandemic, remains one of the few world records set at the meeting in recent years. Organisers had promoted the attempt as a centrepiece of their anniversary evening, and without it the distance interest on night one fell entirely on the 1500m final, where Cameron Myers beat Jakob Ingebrigtsen and five Americans to the Diamond Trophy.
For Gressier the calculation is simple enough. His European 5km record stands two seconds from the world mark, the Copenhagen course is flat and the field will contain most of the men who could plausibly beat him. A win there, two years after his 10,000m world title, would establish him as the dominant road 5km runner of his generation, and there will be other opportunities to run for an hour on a track. Farah's record, which has now outlived two announced challengers, keeps its place in the books for at least another year.