Marathon
Majors

Five Races That Became a Series

The World Marathon Majors began in 2006 as an agreement between five races that were already the biggest in the sport — Boston, London, Berlin, Chicago and New York — to keep a shared scoreboard and crown a champion across them. Tokyo joined as the sixth in 2013, the first race in the series from outside Europe and North America, and the group has carried its title sponsor's name, Abbott, for most of its existence.

For nearly a decade the club did not move. Then it did, twice in two years: Sydney was confirmed as the seventh Major in November 2024 and ran its first edition with the star on 31 August 2025, and on 10 June 2026 the Cape Town Marathon passed its final assessment to become the eighth — the first Major on African soil, formally joining at its 23 May 2027 edition. Shanghai is still working through the same candidate process. The six-race club is becoming a nine-race one, on purpose and in public.

Seven Stamps, One Collection

What separates the Majors from every other label in running is that people collect them. The series is arranged like a passport: seven cities in a fixed calendar order, from Tokyo opening the year in early March to New York closing it on the first Sunday of November. Each one keeps its own character — Boston has run every year since 1897 and is the oldest annual marathon there is; Sydney is the race the city kept going after its 2000 Olympics; Berlin is where records go to fall.

Where the Records Live

The reason the Majors dominate the record books is simple: the fastest fields, the deepest pacing budgets and, in three cases, courses engineered for speed. Berlin owned the men's world record outright for two decades — every time it was broken between 2003 and 2022, it was broken there, eight records in a row, from Paul Tergat's 2:04:55 to Eliud Kipchoge's 2:01:09. Chicago took the baton in 2023 with Kelvin Kiptum's 2:00:35, run five months before his death in a road accident at 24 — a mark remembered as much for the man as for the time.

And then London ended the sport's longest countdown. On 26 April 2026, Sabastian Sawe ran 1:59:30 — the first sub-two-hour marathon ever recorded in an open race, ratified by World Athletics, 65 seconds inside Kiptum's record. It was not even a solo act: Yomif Kejelcha crossed second in 1:59:41, and Jacob Kiplimo third in 2:00:28. The same morning, Tigst Assefa took the women-only world record to 2:15:41. One race, one day, two record books rewritten.

The wall had been cracked before, but never in competition. Kipchoge's 1:59:40 in Vienna in 2019 was an exhibition — rotating pacers, no rivals, no ratification — which is exactly why Sawe's London run mattered so much: it did in a Major, under racing rules, what had previously needed laboratory conditions.

The women's ledger runs through the same cities. Paula Radcliffe's 2:15:25 from London 2003 survived sixteen years of attacks; Brigid Kosgei finally took it down in Chicago in 2019, Assefa moved the mixed-race mark to 2:11:53 in Berlin in 2023, and Ruth Chepngetich became the first woman under 2:10 with 2:09:56 in Chicago in 2024. That last mark still stands in the books; Chepngetich herself is serving a three-year doping ban imposed in October 2025, from a positive sample given months after the record — both facts belong in the same sentence.

Six Stars on One Medal

For everyone who is not chasing the win, the series has a finish line of its own: the Six Star Medal, awarded for completing the six original Majors — Tokyo, Boston, London, Berlin, Chicago and New York. By the end of 2025, more than 23,000 runners had done it. Sydney now counts as a seventh star — over 4,500 people already hold all seven — and the organisers have said that once the series reaches nine races, a Nine Star Medal will follow. The six-star mark itself stays exactly as it is.

The medal chase explains a number that would otherwise make no sense: the 2025 New York City Marathon finished 59,226 runners, the largest marathon ever staged, beating the 56,640 of that spring's London. The Majors are the only races in the sport where the last finisher and the first are collecting the same thing.

Even the greatest of them wanted the medal. Eliud Kipchoge — eleven Major wins, five of them in Berlin, twice Olympic champion — closed his professional Majors career at New York on 2 November 2025, finishing 17th in 2:14:36 for his sixth star. His set of six averages 2:05:46 per race, the fastest Six Star collection ever assembled, ahead of Geoffrey Kamworor's 2:07:05. He left the record books to others and took the medal.

The Title Nobody Watches the Clock For

Underneath the mass-participation story, the Majors still run the scoreboard they were founded for. Elite runners score points by finishing position — 25 for a win, then 16, 9, 4 and 1 down to fifth — with each athlete's best two races counting in a scoring cycle. The champions of each series take US$50,000, and the same scale is paid to the wheelchair division champions, equal to the cent.

The 2026 scoreboard is four races old and already historic. Every Major run this year has ended with a record of some kind: Tadese Takele repeated in Tokyo (2:03:37) while Brigid Kosgei took the course record with 2:14:29; John Korir's 2:01:52 and Sharon Lokedi's repeat win rewrote Boston; London produced the world records above; and in Sydney, Addisu Gobena's 2:04:42 broke the course record while Peres Jepchirchir collected her fourth Major title in 2:18:31. Berlin (27 September), Chicago (11 October) and New York (1 November) are still to come — what happens there is their business, not this page's.

Sponsor Kit, Not Federation Kit

One reading rule matters to what we do at Elite Athletics Clothes: a Major is not a championship. Nobody lines up in national colours — every athlete races in the kit of the brand or the team that pays them. Sawe broke two hours in adidas; Kipchoge ran his whole Majors career inside the Nike-supplied NN Running Team setup, renamed dsm-firmenich in 2026; Kiplimo and Chepngetich come out of the Rosa & Co camp; and Boston itself has been an adidas race since 1989, under contract to 2030, while Sydney carries Asics in its official name.

Sponsor kit · in the archiveNike NN Running Team Pro Elite Training Women PoloTeam-issue kit from the NN Running line — the crew built around Eliud Kipchoge, whose eleven Major wins are still the series record.80,00 €View piece →

That is why this page points at the brand shelves rather than at any national rail. The lines those marathon crews wear each have their own story in the journal — Nike Pro Elite, adidas Pro Elite and Asics Pro Elite among them — and the rail below holds one athlete-issued piece from each of the eight lines in the archive.