I was never good at sports. In fact, my claim to fame was always having an excuse to miss PE lessons at high school. It wasn’t until I discovered cycling after I left school, and running in my 30s, that I became athletic in any meaningful sense.

This lack of exposure to team sports means my athletic interests are heavily skewed towards individual events, and highly obscure ones at that. Currently this takes the form of ultramarathon running, events in which people head out and run inordinately long distances at roughly the pace of continental drift. Ultras have accurately been described as competitive eating contests with occasional bouts of exercise. The ability to go long, go slow, and rest regularly has always appealed.

One even more obscure corner of the already obscure ultrarunning pantheon is Big’s Backyard Ultra. Invented by the wonderfully eccentric Lazarus Lake, the same mind responsible for the infamous Barkley Marathons, the format is disarmingly simple. Competitors run a 6.706-kilometre loop every hour, on the hour. Finish before the next hour begins, and you earn the right to start another lap. Finish late, and you’re out. Fail to start the next lap, and you’re out. There are no prizes for second place because there is no second place. Eventually only one runner remains, completing one final lap after everyone else has stopped. Everyone else records a DNF, or “Did Not Finish”, which sounds like failure until you realise some of them have just spent four or five days running.

It is an absurdly elegant event that rewards stubbornness every bit as much as fitness. It is also governed by a rulebook that occasionally feels less like a sporting code and more like the collected musings of its inventor. Since Laz created the sport, writes the rules and is effectively the Supreme Court of Backyard Ultra, his interpretation is less “guidance” and more constitutional law. Backyard runners don’t so much debate the rules as nod politely and accept that Laz probably knows what he’s doing.

The current world record belongs to Australian Phil Gore, who completed an astonishing 119 laps, almost 800 kilometres over nearly five continuous days. In an event where competitors already have to be slightly unhinged simply to enter, Gore demonstrated that he was capable of being just a little more unhinged than everyone else.

Recently, however, that record briefly appeared to fall. At a Backyard Ultra held in Russia, three runners exceeded Gore’s mark. Dmitry Klimov reached 123 laps, setting what appeared to be a new world record, while Vera Chevalkina surpassed the women’s world record. It was an extraordinary performance that generated equal measures of excitement and scepticism throughout the ultrarunning community.

Then came the twist. After reviewing the event, Laz concluded that it had failed to comply with the standards required for an official Backyard Ultra. The most widely discussed issues related to pacing and outside assistance. Whether every one of those rules is immediately obvious to newcomers is perhaps debatable; parts of the Backyard rulebook are fairly vague and open to interpretation.

Nevertheless, Laz is the sole arbiter of the sport he created, and he ruled that the event would be disqualified in its entirety. The miles were still run. The records simply weren’t. The performances remained extraordinary personal achievements, but they would not enter the official record books.

Predictably, the internet erupted. Some insisted the athletes had been unfairly punished for organisers’ mistakes. Others questioned whether the performances had ever been credible. Before long, social media had transformed an obscure technical discussion about endurance running into something approaching a geopolitical debate.

What interested me, though, wasn’t the ruling. It was Phil Gore. If there was ever an opportunity for a little gloating, this was it. His world record had apparently been broken, only to be reinstated by a decision made by someone else. It would have been easy to quietly celebrate.

Instead, Gore did almost the opposite. He congratulated the Russian athletes. He acknowledged that, official record or not, they had physically run further than he ever had. He resisted the temptation to question either their integrity or their performances, suggesting instead that any rule breaches appeared more likely to reflect misunderstandings of an unusually quirky rulebook than any deliberate attempt to gain an unfair advantage.

Most tellingly, he expressed sympathy for the athletes themselves. He spoke about the enormous effort required to run those distances and how devastating it would be to have that achievement questioned after the fact. Rather than celebrating the return of his record, he said he hoped the episode would encourage greater clarity around the rules and that the Russian runners would get another opportunity to have a fair crack at the record.

He even acknowledged that some of the scrutiny may have been amplified simply because the event took place in Russia, while carefully avoiding any political point-scoring. His focus remained where it belonged: on the athletes and the sport.

That, to me, is sportsmanship. Not pretending the event never happened because the record books say it didn’t. Not clinging to a title won by administrative technicality. Simply recognising that extraordinary performances remain extraordinary, while also accepting that records only have meaning if everyone competes under the same rules.

Five years from now, almost nobody will remember whether the Backyard world record was 119 laps or 123. Fewer still will remember precisely why one event was removed from the record books. People will, however, remember Phil Gore. Not because he ran further than almost anyone else on Earth, although that is impressive enough. They’ll remember him because, when the spotlight landed squarely on him, he chose generosity over triumphalism, empathy over ego and grace over self-interest.

In the end, that may prove to be the most enduring performance of them all.