The morning of the biggest race of his life Josh Kerr sought out his parents and fiancée and told them something that would have done absolutely nothing for their jangled nerves: “If I don’t win this one, I’ll never win one.”

It was Wednesday August 23, 2023 and Kerr was a matter of hours away from the 1,500m World Championships final, a race that would see him go up against the strongest milers in the world and, in Norway’s Olympic champion Jakob Ingebrigtsen, a resounding favourite considered (and not just by himself) as a genuine contender for the greatest of all time.

“They [Kerr’s family] looked at me and were like, ‘yeah, that makes perfect sense’. But internally, they would have been shitting themselves,” he says. “Like, that’s an insane thing to say. They must have thought: ‘Why on earth have you told us this?’”

He adds: “But that’s how I felt. I knew I’d left literally no stone unturned. I’d got the sleep right, the nutrition right, I’d done all the mileage and the sessions. I’d thrown everything at it. Everything. And I was ready to go to war. It was a very calming feeling.” He laughs. “Just not especially for them.”

What followed on that warm summer’s evening in Budapest has passed into British middle-distance folklore. The Edinburgh man, eyes masked by wrap-around Oakleys, tracks Ingebrigtsen through the brisk early laps, his long-striding fluidity the equal of the Norwegian’s metronomic, forward-leaning gait.

Through the bell, they’re first and second, with the Olympic champion glued to the kerb and winding it up, Kerr on his shoulder and the pack clinging on behind. With exactly 200m to go, Kerr kicks. It’s a move of such school-boy obviousness as to carry the weight of surprise. The Norwegian is momentarily unsettled but fights to keep the inside lane.

Running shoulder to shoulder, the pair battle round the bend and into the final straight. Slowly, agonisingly, the slenderest of leads opens up. A flicker of concern registers on Ingebrigtsen's famously inscrutable demeanour, followed by something akin to panic. “With 50m to go, I just knew I had him,” recalls Kerr. “But, God, did it feel like a long way to that line.”

Nearly a year on, the extraordinary climax of that race has lost none of its raw drama and intensity. Kerr straining across the line, to complete a final-lap split of 52.77 run mostly in lane 2 – then running onwards to celebrate with his euphoric, emotionally drained retinue. Ingebrigsten ambling around the track, ashen faced and disorientated like an earthquake survivor.

It took the Norwegian several days to find the right words and when he did they were characteristically churlish. Asked after his consolation win in the 5,000m whether it would be a big deal to race Kerr again, he snorted derisively, stared down his interviewer and said simply “no”. “If you stumble and fall,” he said, alluding to his claims that he’d been nursing a sore throat on the night, “someone is going to win the race. He [Kerr] was just the next guy.”

It was the sort of witheringly contemptuous remark – one from an oeuvre so sizeable it has spawned “best of” montages on YouTube – that Kerr could watch on repeat ahead of the two athletes’ hotly anticipated rematch at this summer’s Paris Olympics, drawing limitless extra motivation. But the more time you spend with the poised Scot, the more you realise something: he really doesn’t need any.