The latest update from the Ingebrigtsens’ ongoing quest to become the Kardashians of Norway is that, in the fourth episode of the Amazon docuseries “Born To Run,” 2x Olympic champion Jakob Ingebrigtsen shared that he doesn’t consider British miler Josh Kerr a rival:

“...He’s a very good runner who had a really good race when many others had a bad race. Those are the facts. The problem with the rivalry is that it’s not created by the media. It’s only created by that moron because he began trash-talking me.”

With all due respect… huh?!?

Even when recognizing that something may have been lost in the Norwegian-to-English translation here, there’s no way to find Jakob’s assertion even remotely true. Let’s say a good sports rivalry includes three components: 1) frequent competition between two parties; 2) close results in said competitions, and 3) intense emotional investment in the outcomes.

To put it more bluntly, Josh Kerr and Jakob Ingebrigtsen are rivals.

The duo have raced head-to-head in the mile/1500m 12 times over the course of their careers (18 if you include heats), including the last five global 1500m finals. (They’re also the only two men in the world who’ve been in every one of those finals.) In championships, Ingebrigtsen holds a 3-2 advantage, but Kerr has gotten the better outcome the last two rounds. Of those races, the farthest apart they’ve finished was in 2022, when Ingebrigtsen placed 2nd to Kerr’s 5th – that’s also their biggest time gap at 1.13 seconds. On average, they’ve finished one place and 0.68 seconds apart.

Fun fact: the duo’s first-ever head-to-head meeting was at the World U20 championships back in 2016, where a then-15-year-old Ingebrigtsen finished 9th, one spot and 0.14 seconds ahead of Kerr in tenth. They’ve seemingly been tied together by fate from the very start.

And as for emotional investment, you could argue, perhaps, that Kerr and Ingebrigtsen were ships passing in the night for the first part of their pro careers. Hell, as recently as 2022 Timothy Cheruiyot seemed like the bigger threat to the upstart Norwegian’s dominance over 1500m. But then came Budapest, where a hard-kicking Scot relegated Ingebrigtsen to silver for the second straight championship, and post-race interviews sparked fireworks – Ingebrigtsen blamed illness (but then came back to win the 5000m four days later) and Kerr attributed Ingebrigtsen’s semifinal showboating to “insecurity.” The latter, in particular, seemed to touch a nerve with Ingebrigtsen (perhaps proving Kerr’s point), setting off a year-long firestorm of sniping at one another in the press over the offseason leading up to their rematch at this year’s Prefontaine Classic.