Backyard Ultra: Belgian World Record but World Championship to USA

At the Backyard Ultra World Championships, which concluded on Thursday evening after 5 days and 4 hours of non-stop racing, two Belgian athletes set a new world record without winning the title. Merijn Geerts and Ivo Steyaert together completed 124 laps, covering 831.5 km and surpassing the previous official record of 119 laps.

Despite this extraordinary performance, equivalent to nearly 20 marathons, Belgium did not win the team gold. The world title went to the United States, whose team members collectively totaled 1,120 laps. Australia took second place (1,069 laps) and Belgium third (1,058).

According to the rules, since both Belgian athletes stopped after the 124th lap without starting the next one, they were classified as Did Not Finish (DNF). To be declared the individual winner, one of them would have had to complete the 125th lap alone.

The Backyard Ultra is an extreme ultramarathon competition with a unique format: participants must complete a lap of approximately 6.706 kilometers every hour, starting at the beginning of each hour. The race continues until only one athlete remains capable of meeting the time requirement. It is thus a test of physical and mental endurance without a predetermined distance or time limit, where the last survivor wins.

The discipline, created in 2011 by American Gary "Lazarus Lake" Cantrell, has gained popularity for its psychological brutality. It is not about running the absolute longest distance, but about outlasting everyone else in a repetitive cycle. World records are measured by the number of laps completed consecutively within the time limit.

In the Team World Championships, alongside individual performance, the sum of the laps completed by all members of the national team counts. This explains the paradox of the two Belgians: despite having run more than anyone else in the history of the discipline, their extraordinary performance was not enough to compensate for the overall contribution of the opposing teams, which were either larger or more consistent.