The seven-year-old video never gets too old.
It’s of an athlete, in the first place of the European U-23 cross-country championship, sauntering towards the finish line. Brimming with confidence, he grabs a couple of French flags from the supporters lining up the route. Then, he decides to celebrate his win in style. So, instead of merely crossing the finish line, he chooses to slide through the tape. The athlete goes down on his knees only to realise that the slushy field isn’t slippery enough. So, his knees halt abruptly before the finish line and he stumbles forward, his head hitting the tape as he nearly falls face-first into the mud.
Jimmy Gressier’s career is littered by such finish-line mishaps. Until it all went to plan under the bright lights of Tokyo’s National Stadium on Sunday night.
How not to finish a cross country race. 🙈#Tilburg2018 pic.twitter.com/2kJ3I6WOFb
— European Athletics (@EuroAthletics) December 9, 2018
The Frenchman became the first athlete born outside Africa to win a global 10,000m title since Alberto Cova of Italy at the 1984 Olympics. Cova was also the last athlete to win the distance at the World Championships back in 1983,
The 10,000m is a race reserved for the runners from Africa. Since 1984, all World Championships except three have been held by athletes from Kenya, Ethiopia and Uganda. The three-year exception was from 2013 to 2017, when Mo Farah — the British runner who was born in Somalia — ruled the race.
This event isn’t an exception. According to a July 2024 report in the Genetic Literacy Project regarding men’s races, ‘every running world record at every distance from 100 metres to the marathon is held by an athlete of African descent’. This has since changed, with Jakob Ingebrigsten and Karsten Warholm making their moves over the 1500m and 400m hurdles respectively. The report further added: “Roughly 97 per cent of the top athletes at every running distance are black.”
On Sunday night, when the lead pack emerged from the final bend onto the home stretch, a white European male winning the race still seemed an unattainable task.
MUST WATCH: French commentators go CRAZY watching Jimmy Gressier’s kick to win 10,000m gold #WorldAthleticsChamps pic.twitter.com/XnNAbv9bkE
— CITIUS MAG (@CitiusMag) September 14, 2025
Gressier was sixth entering the final straight. After slow-burning 25 laps, the cagey, tactical race had suddenly turned into a sprint. In the final 100m or so, Gressier was boxed in. With a sudden surge, he first found the tiny space on the inside to get away from Americans Grant Fisher and Nico Young — who blocked the outside lanes. He then dug deep for the final kick, beating the two Ethiopians who formed a wall in front of him, Selemon Barega and Yomif Kejelcha, and Sweden’s Andreas Almgren.
There were no stunts on the finish line this time — as he touched the tape, Gressier looked in disbelief — eyes wide open, jaw dropped and drenched in sweat. He turned to the cameras: “I started running for this,” he told France 2. “No one can take this from me… I’m so happy to give this medal to France, my family and my city.”
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This moment — with the gold medal around his neck — seemed improbable when he was growing up in the French industrial town of Boulogne-sur-Mer. In an interview with olympics.com, Gressier described it as a ‘tough neighbourhood’. “Either sport would get me out of the blocks, or I’d have to work in a factory because I would have quit school,” he told the website. “I knew that I needed to be good at school to be a professional athlete, so I didn’t give up on school. I knew I wanted to succeed in sport.”
Sport was everywhere in his hometown. Football, not athletics. This was, after all, where France hall of famer Franck Ribery grew up. Before he became an athlete, Gressier was running on another ground — following the footsteps of his hero on the football pitch.
France’s Jimmy Gressier celebrates as he wins the gold medal in the men’s 10,000 meters final at the World Athletics Championships in Tokyo, Sunday, Sept. 14, 2025. (AP Photo/Petr David Josek)
According to French media reports, Gressier was ‘naturally gifted’ as a footballer but local coaches spotted his athletic potential and urged him to crossover. The football coaches, meanwhile, sold him another dream. “They were telling me they never saw my kind of skills on any footballer,” Gressier would say. “I took part in local school athletics competitions and I was beating the young athletes.”
At 17, he finally stopped playing football because his coaches told him he could ‘reach the French team in athletics and be an Olympian’. “Wearing the national jersey is too beautiful,” he said.
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For a decade, his career has been littered with more meme-worthy moments than memories on track. So much so that he once considered giving up long-distance running and switching to steeplechase due to the constant disappointments.
Olympic champion Ingebrigtsen convinced him to give distance running another chance. And Gressier took it. Not stumbling at the finish line like he did in the video that went viral. But powering through for one of the upsets of the Worlds.
“I guess,” he told Athletics Weekly, “I will be better known in future for being a world champion.”
