The 5000m Heats at Paris Olympics Were Chaos After 4-Man Pile Up, Cameraman on the Track

While you were sleeping, there was quite the commotion at the 2024 Paris Olympics .

During the second heat of the men’s 5000m qualifying round on Wednesday, August 7, a cameraman carried his filming equipment as he casually walked toward the athletes.

As the runners rounded the bend on the track, the camera operator got closer — until he halted in place, realizing his mistake. In footage from the race, Norwegian runner Jakob Ingebrigtsen swerved behind the cameraman to miss his path.

The mishap quickly went viral on social media. “The cameraman just walked through the 5000m race what the actual hell,” one user wrote via X on Wednesday alongside footage from the competition, while another added , “WHAT ON EARTH?!?!? Cameraman just standing on the track during the middle of the 5000m. Jakob Ingebrigtsen has to go wide to avoid him.”

During the final stretch of the race, American runner Abdihamid Nur fell and finished last .

After the race concluded, Ingebrigtsen called the incident “amateurish.” (Ingebrigtsen finished first in the heat, with Ethiopia's Biniam Mehary and Belgium's Isaac Kimeli rounding out the top three.)

“That should not happen in an Olympics,” he said, per the Daily Mail . “I was just far enough out in front to see that something or the other is happening. He has quite a large camera rig. He realized it quite quickly, but the damage is done. For some, their race is ruined.”

The cameraman mishap wasn’t the only incident that raised eyebrows on Wednesday. During the first heat of the race, a massive runner crash caused a four-man pile up.

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After the race, Britain’s George Mills pointed his finger in France’s Hugo Hay face.

“I think it’s pretty clear. I got stepped out on as I was about to kick in the home straight and boom, the French lad took me down,” Mills told BBC , according to The Guardian . “From my perspective that was the perfect qualifier for me, going through first 2k in six minutes. I was like: ‘Nobody in this field can run away from me at this pace’, so I was just sitting, waiting, biding my time, gonna kick off the home straight then bang, hit the deck. What can you do?”

When asked about his interaction with Hay, Mills said, “I’m probably not allowed to say.”

While Mills placed 18th in the race, the referee sent him and the three others involved in the crash into the final. Hay automatically advanced because he placed seventh in the race.