Josh Kerr competes in the 3000 meters at the 2026 World Indoor Championships in Torun, Poland. This is Stuart Weir’s second preview of the 2026 Indoor Athletics Championships. Thank you, Stuart.
Josh Kerr World Indoors preview
Josh Kerr he entered the 2025 World Championships with confidence in the 1500m as defending champion and medalist at the previous two Olympics, but things went wrong when injury saw him finish the final 27 seconds behind the winner.
Kerr won gold in the 3000m in his native Scotland at the last worlds, which he has chosen to compete in Torun this weekend. Speaking to British Athletics writers earlier in the week, he admitted that the 3K was the distance that interested him. “3K is a distance that excites me. 5K is not a distance that excites me. I think the 3K strikes a great balance of great 5K runners and great grinds and throws them all together. Positioning is huge, shutter speed is huge. It’s a great race for a little more tactics, but it won’t be stupid slow. sometimes 1500 can be stupidly slow. I don’t see 3K going that way. And so we’re still going to cut it, but the positioning. It’s the perfect way to start your season following these really intense races. So yeah, I’m really excited. I’m sure it’s going to be a great field and I’m ready to rise to the top.”
In a year with no Worlds or Olympics, starting the year with an indoor 3K made sense; “I love it as a competition in general. And when you’re in a year where there aren’t a lot of world championships, you have to take the opportunity and prove you’re the best in the world. 3K was a record for me. Also, I was able to win the worlds in 3K a couple of years ago, so just trying to get back into it after everything that happened last year, it just makes me excited to get out there and race.
I asked him if he thought he was better outside or outside; “I would say outside, but my NCAA titles will tell you inside, but that’s just this time of year. It’s how you deal with everything in your path. But I really think both are my strengths. I like running indoors. I think you can be exposed a little bit with a bad position, so definitely I’m enjoying the outside a little bit more, just because I think the indoor scene has its place and it can create a really great atmosphere inside with some fun opportunities with the World Indoor Championships, the Commonwealth Games, the Europeans and things like that.”
He told us he sees the year without a World Cup as an opportunity, not an anticlimax. For a Scottish athlete to run in Scotland at the Commonwealth Games is massive in itself. He explained. “I have pretty big goals. When you have the flexibility of a race time, when you have the flexibility of no Olympics, you can go out and try to prove why you’re the best runner in the world. I think in those (Olympic) years, one day you can prove that you are the best athlete in the world, but I think this season we will try to see. A 1500m runner in the world, it’s not one day, it’s the whole season and it’s fun for me.
The 3K final is at 19:20 Polish time on Saturday, March 21, 2026.
