Greetings from Tokyo! We’re only one day away from the 2025 World Athletics Championships starting Saturday, September 13th (the evening of Friday the 12th EDT).

In case you missed it, you can read our comprehensive sprint preview here as we move onto the events 800m on up. During the meet, we’ll bring you minute-by-minute coverage, daily live shows, and newsletters all along the way. You can find a full schedule with entries and live results here.

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How to keep up with all of CITIUS MAG’s extensive coverage of the World Championships – powered by ASICS:

• 🎥 CHAMPS CHATS - We will be streaming our post-race show live on YouTube at the conclusion of every evening session in Tokyo (AM in America) featuring Chris Chavez, Eric Jenkins, Anderson Emerole, Paul Hof-Mahoney and more from the CITIUS MAG team.
• 🎧 CHAMPS CHATS | Will immediately be available to stream, download and listen as a podcast on Apple Podcasts + Spotify or wherever you get your shows on The CITIUS MAG Podcast feed. Exclusive interviews with athletes will also be published as podcasts.
• 🎧 We will have episodes of Off The Rails live from Tokyo | Apple Podcasts + Spotify
• 📬 Daily newsletters, so be sure you’re subscribed to the CITIUS MAG Newsletter
• 🎦 Post-race interviews on the CITIUS MAG YouTube channel.
• 📲 Follow along for all updates, news, results and more on X and Instagram.
• 📆 Bookmark our full schedule of events here.
• 🏃 If you’re in Tokyo, join us for group runs with Asics on Sept. 12th and Sept. 19th. Details here.

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Schedule + How To Watch

Heats: Tuesday, September 16th at 6:35 am ET on Peacock and USA

Semifinals: Thursday, September 18th at 8:45 am ET on Peacock and USA

Final: Saturday, September 20th at 9:22 am ET on Peacock and CNBC

Top contenders: The men’s 800 meters continues to explode in 2025 and while there have not been as many 1:41 performances as in the lead-up to the Paris Olympics, the event continues to feel like it’s at its best ever. David Rudisha’s 1:40.91 world record from the 2012 Olympics has been on watch all season and that will continue to be the case.

Olympic champion Emmanuel Wanyonyi has given no reason to strip him of the favorite status—he’s posted the three fastest times in the world for the year, won the Diamond League title and impressed with a variety of race tactics in several of those victories. The 1:41.44 in Monaco was simply a warning shot for what could be in store in Tokyo.

But it’s easy to forget that he’s not the reigning World champion. That title belongs to Canadian Marco Arop, who beat him in Budapest by 0.29 seconds. Arop earned the silver medal in Paris and certainly belongs among the favorites in Tokyo but has not been as sharp as last year. Yes, Arop beat Wanyonyi in Kingston at the inaugural Grand Slam meet, but that was months ago. He did run 1:42.22 to finish just 0.22 back of Wanonyi in London and was .30 back in the Diamond League final. Arop has not been shy about testing (and sometimes failing) with different tactics to see what race plan would best suit him at the championships. No man has won back-to-back World Championship 800m gold medals since Wilson Kipketer’s insane threepeat from 1995-1999.

Dark horses: It’s hard to throw a former World champion into the “dark horse” label, but it’s fair to do so when this is Donavan Brazier’s first time back at this stage since 2022… and he barely ran in the years in between. The questions around Brazier’s comeback centered on how he would handle the rounds of a championship but he cast those doubts aside by winning the U.S. Championships in a personal best of 1:42.16. Each time out, Brazier has looked better with more training under his belt. He’s had a month since the U.S. Championships and should be more prepared for the best of the best since he got his first glance at them at the London Diamond League and finished sixth in a then-season’s best of 1:43.08.

Algerian Djamel Sedjati can’t be counted out for a medal given that he made the podium at the 2022 World Championships and was the bronze medalist in Paris. He’s run 1:42 on three occasions this season and has not finished worse than fourth in a race, which came at the Diamond League final.

American record holder Bryce Hoppel came just .17 seconds shy of a medal in Paris and will look for a bit of redemption. He managed to make the team with a third place finish at the U.S. Championships and then didn’t have great showings at the Lausanne (9th, 1:48.18) or Zurich (7th, 1:43.78) Diamond League meets. On the opposite side, momentum-wise, Max Burgin of Team GB is looking to channel his runner-up finish in the Diamond League final, where he ran 1:42.42. Burgin was eighth in the Olympic final.

You’ll probably see lots of NBC’s spotlight in this event around 16-year-old Cooper Lutkenhaus who will make history as the youngest-ever American to compete at the World Championships. He is the sixth-fastest man in the world this year so reaching the final wouldn’t be out of the question.

One good stat: No one has run faster at a World Championships than Brazier’s 1:42.34 to win gold at the 2019 World Championships in Doha. For 4 years, 10 months, and 9 days, that was the American record, too. But there are five guys in the field who have run faster than that in 2025—including Brazier.