2026 World Athletics Ultimate Championships details announced -- new mixed 4x100m relay, no shot put/discus/10K/steeple

only $150k. Hollywood paid Shohei $75,000,000 and he doesn't speak English.

Surprised there was no mile steeple after all the testing they did. Maybe they decided it was too dangerous which is too bad, seemed super cool.

plus the winning charity city has to pay $1000/nite hotel/food for 3 thousand WA VIPs, and 7 days of Convention Center Rental the week before.

I agree the choice of field events is strange. At first I thought they included the women’s triple jump just for Rojas since she is a big star but that doesn’t explain the men’s hammer. Is Ethan Katzberg that big of a draw to fans? The only explanation I can think of for choosing hammer over shot put is that it’s cooler to see something fly 80m through the air than 20m.

mixed 4x100 gonna be a sh!t show. watching an 11 hand off to a 10, and then a 10 handing off to an 11 gonna be interesting.

high schoolers actually figure out how to pull it off quite well, but these guys can't even pull off good handoffs with similar speed runners. The countries who put in the work will be rewarded.

Hammer instead of shot put? Odd. I think mile steeple should’ve happened and I’d scrap having two mixed relays for just one in the mixed 4x100. Otherwise I can’t really complain, it will be fun to watch.

Do they have to run the mixed 4x100 in a specific order? I know the mixed 4x 400 changed to have to be a specific order in 2022 - can they just go woman, woman, man, man?

No decathlon or heptathlon either.

I feel bad for Ryan Crouser. First all field events get left out of Grand Slam Track, and now this. One of the sport’s all-time greats deserves better.

Also noteworthy: athletes will represent their national teams, but there is no limit on how many athletes from one country can compete in each event.

I don’t understand this terrible obsession with changing and removing events. The only people who watch track are track fans and they don’t need gimmicks, and removing field events because they’re afraid morons might find them boring is insulting and a betrayal of our own athletes

Dec and Hep only work with a full T&F schedule, like an Olympics or WC. With a reduced schedule, you end up with fewer/shorter breaks due to fewer events in-between, plus the multi-events clog up the schedule themselves and each event day only runs for so long.

That's understandable from a scheduling standpoint, but it's still worth pointing out that a global championship competition is going to be missing a number of standard track and field events.

As fans, we'll need to decide how much weight we give this new competition when evaluating athletes' achievements. In the initial World Athletics press release in June, they billed it as "a groundbreaking new global championship event set to transform the athletics calendar and define which athlete is the best of the best – pitting world champions, Olympic champions, the Wanda Diamond League winners and the year’s best performing athletes against each other, to crown the ultimate champion."

With its name and that description, the "Ultimate Championship" is being presented as the preeminent athletics competition, above all others (it will even be held in Olympic years, after the Olympics). I'm not buying that. I wouldn't consider it to be more prestigious than the Olympics or world championships.

When talking about athletes' career achievements, we often combine Olympic medals and world championship medals together into one category as "global championship medals." Will we lump medals from this competition in with those? Considering the condensed schedule, lack of heats, reduced number of events, and smaller number of participants in each event, this competition seems more akin to a Diamond League Final than the Olympics and world championships.

worldathletics.org

World Athletics Ultimate Championship: a new global championship for the sport | News | Budapest 26 | World Athletics Ultimate Championships

World Athletics announces new global championship to conclude the 2026 track and field season

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Maybe the easy answer of why add men’s hammer is that is the event that the highest ranked Hungarian male field event athlete is a hammer thrower.

World Athletics needs to make sure that this new event doesn't undermine the status of the World Championships - they should make it clear that becoming World Champion is the ultimate achievement in one of their events rather than World Ultimate Champion.

They could easily double the prize monies by eliminating the Free hotel, food, and conventional center for the 5000 members of the World Athletics big wigs i.e. the Blue Badges.

Gimmicks for $$$ will not "save" the sport. This is a phase created by people with short attention spans. Why not just pay the athletes without all the gimmicks, Abbreviate the schedule and provide quality entertainment while maintaining tradition.

Mixed 4 x 1, takeoff measurements in LJ etc...are just abominations of history. It'll all come back around and peiple will laugh at it. Think St Louis Olympics. Sack races, tug of war and so forth.

No ShotP and therefore no Crouser? You kidding me!!! As a fan of the sprints even I want to see Crouser. Mixed 4x1... Meh... I am less and less excited about this championship now.

And their family. At Worlds in Budapest, I stayed at the same hotel many of the delegates and their families stayed at. I was amazed at the number of families that accompanied.

world athletics values diamond league final wins more than Olympic bronze