By Kyle Merber
April 9, 2026
Like a broken clock, occasionally this newsletter gets something right. Three years ago, following the success of the inaugural World Road Running Championships, TLC made a bold suggestion:
“...Move the marathon from the World Athletics Championships to the World Road Running Championships… then use the funding from the 30,000+ person event to pay elite athletes better than any other race so that it actually crowns the true world champion.”
Yesterday World Athletics announced the introduction of the World Marathon Championships as a standalone event, separate from the World Athletics Championships. The 2027 and 2029 iterations of the race will continue as usual with the marathon as part of the track & field circus, but outside the main tent. Then, in 2030, the ‘thon will do its best David S. Pumpkins impression and declare, “I’m my own thing!”
The initial head scratcher for most fans—including us—was the decision to host this separately from the World Road Running Championships. The marathon is, famously, a road race. But that doesn’t factor in the elephant-sized cash register in the room. If there is economic viability to expand the World Athletics road racing circuit from one marquee event to two, then why not do it?
During the 2023 World Road Running Championships, there were over 13,000 mass participants racing alongside(ish) the pros. Copenhagen is expecting 65,000. The Athens Marathon—the preferred host for the 2030 championship race—managed to include 73,000 participants in 2025 without even being deemed a global championship or major marathon. A lot of high-level track and field hinges on pinching pennies just to break even, but large marathons bring more than a few pennies along with them.
The challenge is to strike a balance between creating new moneymaking opportunities and spreading the talent too thin. In a recent Bill Simmons Podcast with guest knucklehead Chuck Klosterman, the pair of deep thinkers weighed in on whether it’s better in major sports to have a league commissioner who cares more about the health of the business or the spirit of the game.
Most diehard fans likely support the latter. But outside of the quadrennial Olympic Marathon—which is prestigious enough to cut through the concerns over missed appearance fees—the top athletes’ schedules are already punctuated by bag-chasing expeditions to wildly expensive mass-participation-driven races.
Because of the expanded prize pools at World Majors and other big city races, the race at the World Championships currently suffers from seriously diluted fields. It’s common for athletes to drop out once the going gets tough, to save their legs for races like Chicago and New York that—to put it bluntly—matter a whole lot more to them. (In the men’s races across 2023 and 2025, there were only 125 finishers and a whopping 47 DNFs.)
We’ve tried to make the World Marathon Championship matter before. In 1985, the IAAF introduced the World Marathon Cup, a team-based competition where each nation fielded five athletes, with the top three scoring via cumulative time. It was moderately successful for a period of time, but as prize money elsewhere increased, it was harder to drive the same level of interest from fans and broadcasters. The last standalone edition in 1995— held in Athens!—had 75 finishers plus 37 DNFs.
In 1997, the decision to combine the biennial event with the World Athletics Championships was made. The Cup concept persisted, but the team competition was overshadowed by the allure of individual medals, and in 2011 the World Marathon Cup ended.
But lessons were learned and things are different now!
First, this is an individual sport and the efforts to keep pushing team competition aren’t worth the effort. Team scoring is a unique and important aspect of cross country, but it’s not adding much to the road race scene. Can you, without checking, name the team podiums from half marathon at the 2023 champs?
Last year, 59,000+ people ran the New York City Marathon. When the race sold out, there were still virtual lines, tens of thousands deep, eager to pay hundreds of dollars for the experience. In 1985, only 15,000 people ran the five boroughs. The landscape of the sport has shifted, and grown to evolve the potential of this business model.
The World Marathon Cup didn’t focus on mass participation! (In 1991, the London Marathon hosted the event concurrently, so maybe that one did.) The reality is that 99% of marathon runners don’t care who wins, they care about themselves—and that’s perfectly fine. Their entry fees can still get spent. We’d love for some of the people who are inadvertently funding the professional side of things to absorb fandom through osmosis, but even if they don’t, their participation is still a positive.
The shift is no guarantee of success, particularly as the Abbott World Marathon Major circuit continues to expand. In 2030, there could be ten marathons of varying levels of prestige, and we won’t know how that will look or how much people will care until we get there. But compared to the World Championship marathon’s lackluster 2025 existence, it’s worth a try. We’d rather have a commissioner who cares about the health of the business than have no business at all.
Kyle Merber
After hanging up his spikes – but never his running shoes – Kyle pivoted to the media side of things, where he shares his enthusiasm, insights, and experiences with subscribers of The Lap Count newsletter, as well as viewers of CITIUS MAG live shows.
