Depending on exactly when you get to read this, Jakob Ingebrigtsen may or may not have added a couple more global track titles to his name. Unless he trips himself up or somehow runs the wrong way the only assumption is that he will.

Such is Ingebrigtsen’s insatiable appetite for competition that he’s in Nanjing this weekend, when some people would say he has no great reason to be anywhere near China. It’s not just a long way from his home in Norway, he’s got bigger and better things to be aiming for this year.

A World Indoor Championships gold medal is the only one missing from his collection, and in keeping with his approach to all matters on the track, why try to win one of anything when you can try to win two? This remember is the incredibly gifted Ingebrigtsen brother who just keeps on giving. Including as the subject for an athletics column.

The season is already past the spring equinox, and none of the three men who finished ahead of him in the Olympic 1,500m in Paris have gone anywhere near Nanjing. Not that he’s bothered about that: what has always set Ingebrigtsen apart is his unwavering level of motivation to win the next championship race available.

Sarah Healy finishes sixth in World Indoor 3,000m final in Nanjing

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Norwegian marvel Jakob Ingebrigtsen on cusp of completing gold medal collection at World Indoor Championships

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‘I kept saying to myself how much do you want this medal?’ - Kate O’Connor on winning silver

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How Kate O’Connor won her silver medal: In pictures

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During Friday’s opening session in Nanjing, Ingebrigtsen took control of his 1,500m heat as if jogging down the driveway to check his letterbox. He went from the back of the field to the front with a startling injection of pace at the bell and never looked back. That final is set for Sunday (12.15 Irish time), and the battle for second and third will be interesting.

Before that, he’ll race the 3,000m, a straight final on Saturday morning (11.33 Irish time), and if he completes that double, he’ll join Haile Gebrselassie, the only man to do it previously back in 1999. Ingebrigtsen might well have wrapped up his indoor season two weeks ago when winning a third successive European Indoor double in Apeldoorn, a few weeks after breaking the world indoor record over the 1,500m and mile in the same race.

Still only 24, that made it 23 European titles in all, including cross-country and junior titles, his six European outdoors titles, incidentally, one more than we’ve won as a country.

Ingebrigtsen did lose the 1,500m before, finishing second to Samuel Tefera from Ethiopia at the 2022 World Indoors in Belgrade (a day later, Ingebrigtsen revealed he’d tested positive for Covid). He’s also lost three more global 1,500m finals since, including in Paris, but don’t be fooled into thinking Nanjing is part of some redemption exercise. In a chillingly frank interview with Jeremy Wilson of the Telegraph earlier this month, Ingebrigtsen admitted you never recover from losing an Olympic 1,500m, having won the previous title in Tokyo (although he did bounce back to win the 5,000m).

“There’s definitely no way to get over something like that,” he said. “I’m a 1,500m runner – it’s just our philosophy of training is very efficient for the rest. The 1,500 has been the Formula One event of athletics for as long as I remember.

“I think 99 per cent of people who know sport knew that I was going to win that 5k. If you are both fastest and strongest, it’s going to be very difficult [to lose].”

Ingebrigtsen had no reason to run the European cross-country in December, staged in Antalya, Turkey, yet he won that too, and two days after winning his third straight Diamond League 1,500m final in Brussels, he ran the Copenhagen half marathon, collapsing several times through exhaustion, and still finishing in 63:13.

Ingebrigtsen did lose one of his records earlier this week, when on Wednesday Sam Ruthe ran 3:58.35 to win the ACA Mile in Auckland, New Zealand, at age 15 the youngest athlete in history to break the four-minute barrier. Ruthe doesn’t turn 16 until April 12th, and takes that honour from the Norwegian, who as a 16-year-old ran 3:58.07 at the 2017 Prefontaine Classic.

All records are there to be broken, as Ingebrigtsen often says, stating his ultimate ambition to break every distance mark from the 1,500m to the marathon.

“I have a responsibility to see what the human race possibly can do,” he also told Wilson, when inviting him to his home in Sandnes on the southwest coast of Norway. “I will never feel motivated or unmotivated … because it is irrelevant. I’ve always felt a responsibility to do it 100 per cent. I feel a duty to see how fast I can run to show everybody what is possible in our time. That is the goal.”

In March of last year, Ingebrigtsen also hosted Rick Broadbent of the London Times and when asked about his apparent arrogance replied: “Some athletes are scared of saying they are going to win because they’re scared of the downfall if they don’t. What’s the fun in being like that? If I’m not trying to win, then I’ll read a book.”

Against this backdrop, the criminal trial of his father and once devoted coach Gjert is due to start on Monday at the Sør-Rogaland courthouse. It was February of 2022 when Norway’s Stavanger Aftenblad newspaper first reported Gjert was stepping down from his role as coach to his three sons – Henrik, Filip, and Jakob, all of whom he coached to European titles – due to medical reasons, although it later emerged this was due to allegations of violent domestic behaviour.

Gjert denies the charges, the sons are expected to testify at a trial set to draw global attention. After Jakob’s 1,500m success in Tokyo, at age 20, the last season of Team Ingebrigtsen, the family reality show which had run since 2016, received its highest ratings on Norwegian TV, but at the time no one could have imagined there would be a follow-up drama like this.

Older brother Henrik Ingebrigtsen was asked about the situation before: “I don’t think anyone outside the family can understand the situation Jakob is in. He’s trying to perform in a situation that’s unbearable”.

Meanwhile, in a telling farewell in that Telegraph interview, Ingebrigten suggested that win or lose in Nanjing, the only championships races that matter this year take place at the World Championships in Tokyo this September.

“A good start, but really it doesn’t matter − running is not an indoor sport.”