The Swede who found success on the world stage in Tokyo recalls the performance in Stockholm that provided a crucial confidence boost.

Andreas Almgren didn’t waste any time. Within two and a half hours of touching back down in Sweden on his return journey from Tokyo, he was to be found out running. “A 20km,” he says. “I landed in the morning and I felt that by the evening I would be so tired after the trip and the jetlag, so I might as well get going.”

There is no time to sit back and enjoy the feeling of being a world 10,000m medallist. The 30-year-old is now going in hot pursuit of the European half marathon record of 59:13, set by Switzerland’s Julien Wanders in 2019, at the Valencia half marathon on October 26.

It’s a tall order, given that this will be only the second half marathon of his career but, at his first – in Barcelona last year – Almgren got within 10 seconds of that mark. Should he succeed, it will be his third European record of what has been a brilliant year.

First came his run of 26:53 for 10km in January, also in Valencia, before a 5000m mark of 12:44.27 at the Bauhaus Galan Diamond League meeting in front of a home crowd in Stockholm that meant a great deal and provided the perfect kind of confidence boost that made him believe a global medal was possible.

And so it proved in Tokyo. Frenchman Jimmy Gressier took much of the attention with his shock win over Yomif Kejelcha, but Almgren had positioned himself perfectly in the closing chaos to take his place on the podium with bronze. It’s the first time there has been a European winner of the event – indeed, the first time there were any European medallists – since Mo Farah took gold in London 2017.

“It was quite an historic race for us,” says Almgren as he discussed the growing strength of European distance running. “Jimmy and myself were also first and third in the 3000m at the Diamond League final in Zurich and then we had Isaac Kimeli [second] and Jimmy [third] on the 5000m podium [in Tokyo]. And of course we missed the big one with Jakob Ingebrigsten coming back from injury and he would have been a contender as well. So it's very strong now, and I think Jakob has paved the way for making sure that other people believe they can be successful as well.”

As he chats with AW, Almgren has just officially started his half marathon preparations.

“It's a bit different going from trying to sharpen your kick to preparing for the half marathon,” he laughs. “It will take some weeks to get used to it, but I think I'm going to manage.” And he’s happy to be home. He is based in Sollentuna, which sits just to the north of Stockholm, and provides just about everything he needs.

“We have a lot of running trails, we have our home track, and just right next to it is an indoor track. There are gyms connected to it, too. The only thing missing is altitude,” he grins.

It’s from here that Almgren planned his world championships assault. He has had to overcome a number of injury issues during his career and a stress fracture to his tibia forced him to withdraw from the Paris Olympics last summer.

“When I decided that I wasn’t going to run, one of the first things I did was to write down September 14, 2025 in an Excel spreadsheet and then started backwards engineering,” he says. “To make sure of: ‘How am I going to be as fit as possible for the 10,000m in Tokyo?”

He adds: “It's been a very good year for me. It's the first year in my career when I basically have had no problems whatsoever. I got back to full training in October and I had a cold in December but, apart from that, I had no problems and when you get that consistency, you're obviously going to get some results.”

A key landmark on the journey was that Stockholm Diamond League 5000m performance, where a sizeable crowd at the Olympic Stadium who had just roared Mondo Duplantis to a pole vault world record suddenly found another home athlete on the brink of achieving something spectacular.

“I love racing in Stockholm in front of my home crowd, and it was so special,” says Almgren, who has raced at the venue since the age of around 11. “During our third or fourth lap, Mondo broke the world record so the audience was already quite hyped, and when they started realising that I was going for the European record, it was such an intense atmosphere there.”

In years past, Almgren had been in that crowd to watch some of the greats in action. “So to be able to break both the European record, but also a stadium record, it meant a lot to me. “When I ran that race, I really felt like: ‘I'm on the right trajectory. I'm going to be a medal contender [in Tokyo]’.”

With his success this year, Almgren will find himself getting plenty of attention in his home city at the 2026 Diamond League meeting in early June, too, when he hopes to see another bumper crowd at a venue built for the 1912 Olympics.

“It's so historic,” he says. “It looks quite similar to how it would have looked back in 1912 so you really feel the history when you walk into that stadium. It feels very special to be there and now I’ve produced a performance that probably people are going to talk about a lot when they speak about historic moments at the Stockholm meet. It feels very good.”

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