World Athletics announces field information about 2026 Ultimate Champs

A bit weird for the 2024 Olympic champions to auto-qualify. It's more than 2 years later and with the 2025 Worlds champs, 2026 Diamond League champs and top of world rankings 2026, you should have the "ultimate" athletes already.

But I guess there will be quite some overlap anyway and Olympic champions for sure appeal more to the general public ...

Remind me - how are the Ultimate Championships different from World Championships - is this finals only format?

Are there any heats in this? Or is it a straight final? If there are no heats, I could definitely see Jakob completing a double at this championship

How prestigious as track fans are we going to consider this championship as? Is it just a glorified diamond league final with no pacers? Is the diamond league just going to remove the diamond league final in non World Ultimate years? How frequent is this championship going to be?

I think part of it is the lack of country limits. It's trying to find who's the best, regardless of what country they're from. So you can have a final full of Americans, or Kenyans or Ethiopians.

Six sentences from the top in from the provided link in the OP:

They set that schedule that way intentionally to help Jakob. They don’t want Wanyonyi in the 1500 because they know he’d beat Jakob.

Jakob is a bigger star, so they are going to favor him obviously. Not because he might beat him.

I much prefer to watch Crouser compete than any triple jumper or hammer throwing or long distance races except for Faith Kipyegon. So I will be skipping this Championship. With 100/200 that's less than a minute of racing for both men and women and they can't fit every final event of the sport over 3 days? Shows how inefficient they are.

I wish them every success, but ain't getting my money.

The suggestion to put the 800 on Day 1 would not impact Jakob's schedule at all and would only make the 1500 more competitive.

It really shouldn't be complicated to put consecutive (in distance) races on opposite ends of a schedule, for any meet. Near the front: 100/400/1500/10000. Near the end: 200/800/5000/Marathon (if there is a marathon). Flip it for men vs women. Solves all problems because nobody doubles in non-consecutive events (triples like Hassan are incredibly rare, and in that case I'd say it's up to the athlete to make it work).

But will it ever be as Ultimate as the Ultimate Challenge?

Remains to be seen....

No, probably because there aren't any current big-name 800/1500m doublers (besides Kessler, who may not be making 800m teams going forward). Just because Wanyonyi has publicly speculated about doubling doesn't mean they should be rearranging the schedule for him.

Crouser will be throwing 21m or low 22 in 2026. He's battled multiple injuries and health issues recently, threw 21 this week and said on a recent podcast that he's more concerned about preserving himself until LA rather than throwing far. So don't expect him to carry the event.

As the official World T&F Championship for the year, I don't think it'll be considered much differently than regular WCs. Ultimately prestige comes from the quality of the fields, and if it's what everyone is trying to qualify for, it'll be seen as prestigious. I think it's important to note that even the DL final doesn't normally have all of the best athletes in it, in the sense that it's super rare for a DL final race to match the quality of that year's WC/Olympic final.

I will say, I lost some faith in GST after meet 1, but this weekend we'll see if they've learned from some of their mistakes. They have 3 chances to iterate on their product this year. If they've ironed out the kinks in the system by their last meet in June (crowd sizes, downtime, not enough Centro, etc), as well as giving us more moments like the men's 800/1500, and fewer like the men's 3k/5k, I think they might be in a position to get a lot of the top athletes focusing on it rather than the Ultimate Champs.

Seems like just a diamond league final but stars from the past few years get to compete if they moved to the road or were injured and want to run it as a one off.

Plus, he keeps losing to the Italians.