Jimmy Gressier will attempt to break one of the more unusual records in the book on Friday evening, when the world 10,000m champion lines up for a one-hour run at the Diamond League Final in Brussels. The target is Mo Farah's world record of 21.330km, set on the same King Baudouin Stadium track in September 2020, when the Briton edged Bashir Abdi in a race staged during the pandemic-affected season. Meeting organisers confirmed the attempt in the build-up to the two-day final.
The one-hour run is a rare fixture on the modern calendar and rewards a very specific kind of pacing discipline. Farah's mark equates to 53.3 laps of the track, or roughly 2:49 per kilometre sustained for a full hour; Gressier's task is to hold something fractionally quicker than that for the whole 60 minutes and then squeeze out the extra metres in the closing stages. Unlike a standard distance race, the gun fires at the hour and the athlete is credited with wherever they stand on the track at that moment.
The Frenchman's recent form suggests the pace is within reach. Last year he won the half marathon at the European Running Championships on the Brussels-Leuven course in 59:45, an average of 2:50 per kilometre over more than 21km on the road. Last month he ran a European 5km record of 12:51 at the Urban Trail de Lille, two seconds shy of the world best, and his 10,000m world title underlines that he can handle the track's rhythm as well as the road.
Belgium's Isaac Kimeli is among those expected to share the early running, and pacing arrangements will matter more than in almost any other event on the programme. The attempt sits alongside Emmanuel Wanyonyi's ongoing pursuit of David Rudisha's 800m world record as the second headline record bid of the weekend, though the two ask very different questions of their protagonists: one is a 100-second effort, the other a full hour of controlled aggression.
For Gressier, the record would add a distinctive line to a season already defined by a world title and a series of European records across distances. It would also continue Brussels' association with the event, given that Farah's mark and Haile Gebrselassie's earlier 21.285km both came on European tracks in front of knowledgeable crowds. Whether or not the record falls, the attempt gives Friday's programme a rare long-distance centrepiece in a meeting otherwise dominated by sprints, hurdles and the middle distances.