Jake Wightman takes 1500m silver as Josh Kerr suffers injury in World Championship final

Scotland’s Jake Wightman has taken 1500m silver at the World Athletics Championships, narrowly missing out on gold in a dramatic race in Tokyo.

Wightman moved out of a tightly packed group in the final lap to race clear but he was chased down by Portugal’s Isaac Nader, who stormed through to win on the line.

Nader finished in 3.34.10, just two hundredths of a second ahead of Wightman.

Fellow Scot Josh Kerr, World Champion in 2023, suffered a nightmare final, pulling up with an injury mid-race and finishing last in 4.11.23, over 30 seconds behind the rest of the field.

Neil Gourley, the third Scot in the final, was tenth with a time of 3.35.56.

After his podium finish, Wightman said that the chance to have moments like that were what motivated him through two years of injury problems.

“That’s what’s kept me going,” he told the BBC. “I felt I still had that in me.

“All I knew today was that I was going to run for the win. And wherever that got me, whether if was second, third or wherever I ended up I would be happy.

“When you come that close to winning it, you can’t help but be a little ‘What if I had tried a little bit more…’

“But I left everything out there.

“It’s been a very bleak couple of years ago and a couple of times I even doubted myself about getting back to this level. Making this team was the main thing.

“I made some huge changes in my life in the last year to get back to this point. So it’s affected me and my fiancee Georgie because we moved away from London, our home for eight years, to Manchester for physical therapy.

“I got a new coach and a new coaching set-up just to get to this point. They are big changes and had a big impact and I hoped they were for the best.

“It took until this season to show that they are the right decisions.

“You just have to keep waiting and waiting and hope that when the big stage comes, like it has, I could perform when it happens.”