Team GB’s ‘amazing’ middle distance crop could surpass Coe, Cram and Ovett

“It’s amazing, crazy. I don’t think you’ll probably realise how good it is until it is done – that’s the sad thing,” says Jake Wightman, reflecting on a British middle-distance crop which, three weeks from now, could quite feasibly claim to have surpassed even the golden era of Sebastian Coe, Steve Cram and Steve Ovett.

Most of the records have already gone to the new generation, with even the 1min 41.73sec it took Coe to run 800m way back in 1981 in serious peril after Ben Pattison went within 0.54sec of the longest-standard British track record of all last Friday.

Wightman, who won the 2022 world 1500m title but will race over 800m at the Paris Olympics, suspects that he could also go close on the right day following a remarkable global series of times at the distance that has included nine runners dipping under 1min 43sec just this month.

For Team GB, there is also Josh Kerr and Keely Hodgkinson both targeting respective 1500m and 800m golds while Laura Muir heads into Saturday’s London Diamond League off the back of a new British 1500m record. Hodgkinson and Muir – both silver medallists in Tokyo – already hold the British women’s middle distance records and Kerr’s new one mile record suggests that it is only a matter of time before he unseats Mo Farah as well as Cram, Coe and Ovett over 1500m.

While better tracks and super-foamed track spikes have clearly helped, Wightman thinks that the British surge can largely be explained by a Scottish system in which he, Kerr, Muir and the 800m and 1500m Olympians Jemma Reekie and Neil Gourley also came through.

“In Scotland, you are so much better looked after if you are not the best kid,” he says. “I wasn’t an amazing talent when I was real young. I was still given opportunities. We would go on these Scottish athletics camps where you would get taught how to be more professional and just given more appetite for success and winning. If I had grown up in England … getting crushed as a kid… I would have been nowhere near getting any of that, and I think my desire to stay in the sport probably would have dropped.”

Wightman, Kerr and Hodgkinson are among the four Lottery-funded athletes featured in ‘Path to Paris: The Hunt for Gold’,  a new Channel 4 ‘Drive to Survive’-style documentary that will aim to convey the people and lifestyles behind those who will light up our screens in the French capital. Preview footage of Wightman straining to be sick following one particularly gruelling training session provides one indication of what they go through.

“I didn’t change anything we did when the cameras came – it’s very much fly-on-the-wall and a genuine look at what we do and how we live the lives we live,” he says. “It’s a lot more boring than probably most people realise. It’s a pretty tough life – as a result of training hard, you have to live a pretty simple life.

“I’d say the most exciting thing we do when we go on camp is to go out for a coffee. You’ll find that a lot of athletes become these coffee snobs. You’ll have caffeine and coffee before you train but it’s also a massive social element.”

With Kerr having beaten the Norwegian great Jakob Ingebrigtsen in their previous two meetings, there is a considerable edge just now in the men’s 1500m between two athletes who are both naturally alpha-male personalities. “Jakob is saying what he genuinely believes – he just has so much confidence,” says Wightman. “He doesn’t believe that anyone is near therefore he tells you that in whatever way he thinks appropriate.

“For me, I don’t have that reason to slag people off. I don’t feel you have to do anything other than perform as well as you can and beat people when you race. I think for Josh he just responds a lot of the time to what has been said about him. There’s not really an end point.

“My personality just isn’t confrontational. I would rather be good friends with people as much as I can away from the track to make that part of it enjoyable. With my story, it’s not linear – there’s been a lot of ups and downs to get to this Olympics.”

After Wightman missed the chance to defend his world 1500m title last year following injury, those ups and downs have continued in 2024 when, having hoped to double up over 800m and 1500m in Paris, he was forced to miss the British trials with a tear in his soleus muscle in his calf.

The UK selection policy left one discretionary spot in each event and, with Kerr assured of the 1500m place, Wightman was given the last remaining 800m slot with Pattison and Max Burgin. He had run the fastest British 800m this year at the time of the selection, and also has the pedigree of a European silver over the shorter distance, but it was still an agonising wait.

“I didn’t watch the trials – I didn’t think I wanted to do that to myself as there was nothing I could do,” he says. “It would have been crushing to not go. The 800m globally has probably been 30 or 40 people within a second every year – it’s been a very open event. I don’t think the recent fast [race] changes anything. I could have been in that race [the Paris Diamond League where five runners went under 1min 42.5sec] and maybe ran 1.41 or 1.42. I don’t know. There’s guys I’ve raced a lot.

“Time trialling, nice day, nice track, with pacemaker – that is one way of racing. The other is you go into a champs with no pace maker and three rounds. Being able to show I have got more than being a 1500m runner is a really good opportunity and something that really excites me. It is almost even better from my career point of view and my CV could be really enhanced from it.”

National Lottery players have boosted athletics in the UK, with more than £300 million invested since funding began, supporting both grass-roots sport and elite athletes.

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