World Athletics to Launch Standalone World Marathon Championships from 2030

Six months ago in Tokyo, Alphonce Felix Simbu of Tanzania won the men's Worlds marathon in 2:09:48, beating Germany's Amanal Petros by 0.03 seconds on a photo finish: the smallest winning margin in the history of the championship, and the first global athletics title of any discipline for Tanzania. Italy's Iliass Aouani took bronze in 2:09:53 from a field of 90 runners representing 47 nations. It was the best marathon the Worlds has staged in a decade, and it happened inside the format Ridgeon has now announced will be retired.

Retired in favour of what is the question the press release answers by not answering it. The closest the document comes to naming a mechanism is a single sentence: the new championship will be “conceived in close partnership with those who have made the marathon the global phenomenon it is today, with full details of those partnerships to be announced in the coming months.” The partners are not named, and as of the announcement the deal is not signed. A new annual marathon championship is being slotted into a calendar Abbott World Marathon Majors already owns (a circuit expanding from six races to nine, with Sydney added in 2024 and Shanghai's final evaluation due in December), and the federation is asking for the benefit of the doubt on a deal it does not appear to have.

This is the third such event World Athletics has invented in eighteen months, and the reception to the first two is instructive. The World Athletics Ultimate Championship launches in Budapest this September with a $10 million prize pool and $150,000 to each winner, and its programme excludes the 3,000m steeplechase, the 10,000m, shot put, discus, women's hammer, men's triple jump, the combined events, race walks, and, notably given the current story, the marathon. CITIUS MAG's David Melly, reviewing the announcement, asked the obvious question: “Why is a totally new event needed rather than beefing up the Diamond League or slimming down Worlds?” He was being generous. The throwing community, watching shot put and discus carved out of a $10 million event entirely, did not bother with generosity. Four months later, Ridgeon briefed Daily Mail Sport on World Athletics' next idea, a World Treadmill Championships to be delivered with Technogym under a product line called “Run X.” “You are an athlete if you go for a 30-minute run on a treadmill or if you win an Olympic gold medal in the 100 metres,” he told the paper. “It is all athletics.” The first prominent response arrived from Freddie Crittenden, the American Olympic 110m hurdles finalist, in the comments of Athletics Weekly's Instagram post: “Our Global Governing body is really trying to make a Wii sports championships. What are we doing man?”

The honest version of the case for changing something is that the marathon has had a rough decade inside the Worlds. At Doha in 2019, the championships ran in heat indices close to 41°C, with a wave of DNFs in the women's race (athletes were wheeled off the course), and a post-event methodological paper commissioned by World Athletics itself on heat-risk analysis whose existence was a tacit admission the federation had a problem. Decathlete Niklas Kaul called the championships “a disaster”; marathoner Lyndsay Tessier told The Guardian the conditions were “really scary.” Three years later in Eugene, the men's and women's marathons were won in fast times by Tamirat Tola and Gotytom Gebreslase, but the fields were visibly thinner than the WMM races held in the same weeks, as Kenyan contenders in particular chose paid Majors appearances over Hayward Field. Tracksmith's contemporary line captured the vibe: “the world champs marathon happened, and you didn't notice.” If you wanted to build the case for pulling the marathon out of Worlds, Doha and Eugene are where you would start.

Tokyo 2025, however, happened, and the format produced Simbu and Petros. The problem the new event is supposedly designed to solve was visibly solving itself. Athens, with 2,500 years of heritage and a course World Athletics has just upgraded to Elite Label (the Greek capital had held Gold Label since 2010, per Canadian Running), could stage a wonderful marathon. Of course it could. SEGAS has organised the modern Athens Marathon continuously since 1983. The unanswered question is what breaking apart the current Worlds programme is for, given that from 2031 it will not only be the marathon leaving the combined championships but every road running distance.

At the same Tokyo championships that produced the best Worlds marathon in a decade, the men's discus final was a fiasco. Competition began at 8:10pm, was halted almost immediately when a storm rolled in and the first two throwers slipped in the ring, and restarted from scratch near 10:30pm, with athletes throwing in socks and trainers in search of grip. Australia's Matt Denny, in a post-final interview, said: “We're very fortunate everyone has walked away without any life-threatening injuries.” Writing on HMMR Media the next day, Martin Bingisser made the structural point: “If you crack open the current 273-page World Athletics Competition and Technical Rulebook, just one sentence in rule 32.6 covers the throwing surface for the shot put, discus, and hammer.” Track surfaces, by contrast, are governed by a thirteen-page list of tests that includes an acceptable friction coefficient under wet conditions. Throwing rings get one sentence. The same pattern of rain and halted competition had already played out at the women's discus at the delayed Tokyo 2020 Olympics. Mo Saatara, coach of Olympic and World hammer champion Camryn Rogers, told McThrows the standard surface is fine dry and slippery wet. Ole Miss coach John Smith told the same outlet a rain-capable ring can be built for roughly $20 in materials with a muriatic-acid etch.

A governing body that cannot regulate the surface inside a throwing ring, something a university coach can fix in an afternoon for the cost of a few drinks, has found the time and the press-conference oxygen to invent three championships in eighteen months. What the federation chooses to spend its attention on, and in what order, is the question the Athens press release answers by not engaging with it.

Lined up back-to-back, the three World Athletics announcements reveal a consistent voice handling. It is Ridgeon, the CEO, who delivered the “spiritual home” line and the roadmap language about Athens meeting “the rigorous technical and operational standards required for the world's most prestigious stage.” It is Sebastian Coe, the president, who gets the vision paragraph: the “few events in sport carry the weight and resonance of the marathon” and “celebration of mass participation” cadence. The division of labour runs consistently from the Ultimate Championship through the treadmill briefings and into Athens. I take no strong view on whether it matters. I note only that the handling tells you something about where the conviction sits inside the building.

London is bidding for the 2029 World Athletics Championships, as BBC Sport's Lorraine McKenna reported alongside the Athens news. If London wins, the 2029 marathon will be the last marathon contested inside the combined Worlds format, the one this whole announcement has been engineered to render obsolete. A proper farewell, accidentally created by a decision nobody has been willing to explain.