Expanding Into Irrelevance? World Marathon Majors Expansion Is Ill-Conceived Unless They Do This

On Sunday, the news came out after the 2024 TCS New York City Marathon that the six-series Abbott World Marathon Majors will be expanding to Sydney in 2025. And then most likely to Capetown and Shanghai a few years after that.

Considering LetsRun.com covers professional running, I imagine some of you think we think this is good news. Far from it.

LetsRun.com has always been focused on primarily one thing – promoting and covering running as an elite sport, not simply a beneficial fitness activity. The expansion news indicates that the World Marathon Majors have forgotten their roots – they became famous by creating truly elite sporting events first and then mass races second. You can’t have nine majors – that’s a series. The reality is there aren’t enough truly elite marathoners to make the races compelling if you expand too much.

In a day and age when the women’s world record in the marathon in 2:09:56, how in the world can Cape Town – which only 4 times ever has featured a men’s winning time under 2:10 (course record 2:08:15) –  even be in the running? Only three times has the women’s winning time in Cape Town been under 2:25 and the course record is 2:22:22. How do you expect fans to seriously consider it to be a major? Yet Valencia with 25,000+ finishers and 2:01:58 and 2:14:58 course records isn’t?

In the future, will putting on truly compelling elite races and televising them as such be an afterthought for the World Marathon Majors? Have we already started to see that type of creep?

On Sunday on X, the winners of the wheelchair races (52 finishers) or non-binary division (12) in New York were presented as just the same as the winners of the men’s and women’s marathons (more than 55,000 finishers). Annually, an inordinate amount of  New York City’s ESPN2 television broadcast is spent covering the wheelchair races. Not all of the top pro runners were at the pre-race press conference on Thursday, but a sign-language interpreter was, even though none of the media was deaf.

Performative virtue signaling and expansion are definitely in, but does that mean truly promoting elite sport is out?

As I’ve stated before on the podcast, if the World Marathon Majors expands to nine events, they should go to single-sexed elite races at each event. At four events, have a pro-women’s race only. At four others have a  pro men’s race only. And in one have a wheelchair race only.

That way, men’s and women’s marathoning will have four majors – just like in golf and tennis. The fields won’t be diluted. They will be concentrated – victories will mean much more – and the race broadcast will improve TREMENDOUSLY.  It’s MUCH easier to create and broadcast a compelling storyline on live television if you are only producing one sporting event at a time, not four (men’s and women’s wheelchair, men’s and women’s runners). There’s a reason why CBS and Fox only show you one NFL game at a time. Plus it will keep the fields more competitive and make victories more special. And it might save the marathons a nice chunk of change as they will have fewer pros overall to pay and they won’t be competing against each other for elites and the required street closure times will be reduced.

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