Sam Tanner has knocked nearly two and a half seconds off the New Zealand road mile record, running 3min 56.01sec to finish 12th at the World Athletics Road Running Championships in Copenhagen on Saturday.
The 26-year-old from Papamoa was one of 58 starters in a men’s race run through the streets of the Danish capital and finishing beside Parken Stadium. His time wiped out the previous national road mark of 3min 58.45sec, set by Geordie Beamish in Hawaii last year, and RNZ reported it as comfortably the best road mile a New Zealander has run.
Germany’s Robert Farken won the title in 3min 51.80sec, a German record and the fastest road mile run anywhere this year. He sat behind his training partner Yared Nuguse of the United States for most of the race before going past him in the closing metres, with Nuguse second in 3min 52.33sec and Luxembourg’s Ruben Querinjean third in 3min 52.77sec. Querinjean’s bronze was the first global senior athletics medal won by a Luxembourg man since 1952.
“I kept telling myself to wait, wait, wait. Then in the end I just put everything into it,” Farken said in the World Athletics race report.
Australia’s Oliver Hoare was sixth in 3min 53.65sec, an Oceania road mile record, which leaves Tanner six places and just over two seconds behind the best runner from this side of the Tasman on the day.
The road mile is kept as a separate list from the track mile, and the gap between the two explains why a 3min 56sec run counts as a national record for a man who has gone considerably faster on a track. Tanner’s track mile best is 3min 49.51sec, set in 2023. The outright New Zealand mile record belongs to Sam Ruthe, who ran 3min 48.88sec indoors at Boston University in January, breaking Sir John Walker’s 3min 49.08sec from Oslo in 1982 at the age of 16.
Road courses are slower for reasons that have nothing to do with fitness. Runners have to take corners at speed, deal with camber and road surfaces built for cars rather than spikes, and cope with wind that a stadium bowl would block. There are no pacing lights and no lane markings, and a field of 58 on a city street is a very different proposition from 12 runners on a track. Athletics New Zealand had listed Tanner’s road mile best at 4min 02.91sec before Copenhagen, so he improved on his own road time by close to seven seconds.
Tanner is the most experienced middle distance runner New Zealand has had at this level in years. He has run at the Tokyo and Paris Olympics and at three world championships without reaching a final, was sixth in the 1500m at the 2022 Commonwealth Games in Birmingham, and made the mile final at this year’s Commonwealth Games in Glasgow. He joined the On Athletics Club Oceania squad this year under former Australian distance runner Craig Mottram.
Hannah Gapes produced the best New Zealand finish of the championships so far, placing ninth in the women’s 5km in 15min 6sec. The 22-year-old had a 5000m track best of 15min 25.93sec going in, according to the team preview published by Athletics New Zealand, which makes her Copenhagen run a significant step up against a field containing most of the best 5km runners in the world.
Ethiopia’s Likina Amebaw won that race in 14min 41sec, six days after taking the Ultimate 5000m title. “I knew I had to push from the very start and it worked as planned,” she said in the World Athletics report. Caroline Gitonga of Kenya was second in 14min 48sec and Australia’s Rose Davies third in 14min 50sec. Gapes finished two seconds behind Djibouti’s Samiya Hassan Nour and two seconds clear of Britain’s Hannah Nuttall.
In the women’s mile, Alison Andrews-Paul was 36th and Kimberley May 37th. May, who is 23 and has run 4min 04.40sec for 1500m on the track, had framed the trip as preparation rather than a peak. “I’m looking at this as a stepping stone, especially with worlds and then the Olympics coming up,” she told Athletics New Zealand before the championships.
Theo Quax was 43rd in the men’s 5km, won by Eritrea’s Dawit Seare ahead of Norway’s Jakob Ingebrigtsen. Quax, the son of the late Dick Quax, who won Olympic 5000m silver in Montreal and held the world record over the distance in 1977, was making his first appearance in a New Zealand singlet. “It’s an honour to don the black singlet for the first time,” he said when the team was named in June.
Six New Zealanders are still to run. The women’s half marathon starts at 7.10pm New Zealand time on Sunday and the men’s at 7.45pm, with Georgie Grgec and Katherine Camp in the women’s race and Toby Gualter, Connor Melton, William Little and Taonga Mbambo in the men’s. Gualter goes in with a best of 1hr 3min 1sec, the quickest of the four.
Melton, a 27-year-old who has spent most of his career on grass and mud, said his preparation had needed little alteration. “My bread and butter is cross country,” he said in the Athletics New Zealand preview. Grgec, 32, said the format was new to her. “I’ve never done a women’s-only half marathon,” she said.
Athletics New Zealand named 13 athletes for Copenhagen in June before the travelling team settled at 11, and chief executive Cam Mitchell said at the time it was “the strongest team we have ever named for the World Athletics Road Running Championships”. Two days of racing have so far produced a national record and a top ten finish, which suggests he was not overselling it.
What did you make of Sam Tanner’s run, and should New Zealand be sending bigger teams to road championships like this one? Leave a comment below and tell us what you think.
This article was written by AI, briefed to report the facts, hopefully without some of the bias people bring to the job 🙂
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