The Eight Majors: A Complete Guide to the World's Biggest Marathons
A man ran 1:59:30 in London. Africa got its first Major. A ninth race is waiting in Shanghai. The 2026 season has redrawn the top tier of marathon running — here is every race that matters, what it costs you to get in, and where the sport goes next.
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For twenty years, the shorthand for the summit of road running has been "the Majors." Six races, six stars, one medal. That shorthand is now out of date in almost every direction.
The series is eight races, not six. The men's world record starts with a one. And the sport is arguing, in public and for the first time in a serious way, about what a marathon is even supposed to be — a mass-participation festival for sixty thousand people, or a laboratory for the outer edge of human endurance. In 2026 it has managed to be both, sometimes in the same morning.
Here is where things stand.
What actually makes a marathon a "Major"
The Abbott World Marathon Majors began in 2006 as a five-race series — Boston, London, Berlin, Chicago and New York — with Tokyo joining in 2013 to complete the classic six. For a decade after that, nothing moved. Then it moved twice.
Sydney was elevated in November 2024 and ran its first edition as a Major in August 2025. Cape Town was confirmed as the eighth on 10 June 2026 and formally joins at its 23 May 2027 edition, becoming the first Major staged on African soil. Shanghai, the third candidate race, faces a second evaluation at its 6 December 2026 edition. Pass it, and the series reaches nine.
Races don't buy their way in. Candidacy runs across multiple years, with organisers assessed on field size, elite depth, timing and safety operations, sustainability and international reach. Cape Town's bid ran four years — extended when the 2025 edition was cancelled on race morning after high winds wrecked event infrastructure, costing the race an evaluation window it had to wait a full year to get back.
For runners, the currency is the star. Finish a Major, claim a star. Six of them earns the Six Star medal, which Abbott has committed to keeping even after the Nine Star medal arrives — likely 2027, if Shanghai passes. Runners who finished Cape Town in May 2026 were issued provisional stars that converted to the real thing when the race was confirmed.
Tokyo — the season opener
1 March 2026 · 19th edition · Entry: lottery, roughly 10% odds
Tokyo is the most efficiently run marathon in the world and the least discussed. The course is flat, the crowds are relentlessly polite and the field turns over with a Japanese depth no other Major can match — twenty-eight men under 2:07 on the start list is a normal year here.
Ethiopia's Tadese Takele took his second consecutive Tokyo title in 2:03:37, out-sprinting Kenya's Geoffrey Toroitich and 2024 London champion Alexander Mutiso. Brigid Kosgei broke clear before 35km to win in 2:14:29 for her second Tokyo crown — the first real signal that the former world record holder was back. Marcel Hug and Catherine Debrunner won the wheelchair races, which by 2026 barely qualifies as news.
The lottery opens the previous August and rewards persistence: unsuccessful applicants get weighted entry in later years, which is unusual among the Majors.
Boston — the one you have to earn
20 April 2026 · 130th edition · Entry: qualifying time, then a cut-off
The oldest annual marathon in the world is also the only Major with no meaningful lottery. You run a qualifying time for your age group, and then you run faster than that, because demand has broken the system.
The B.A.A. tightened its standards by five minutes for 2026, and it wasn't enough. Applicants still needed to beat the new standard by 4:34 to be accepted, meaning a man aged 18–34 needed 2:50:26 to enter a race that nominally asks for 2:55. Of 33,249 qualifier applications, 24,362 were accepted into a field capped at 30,000. Registration for the 2027 race runs 14–18 September 2026, with a new time index penalising qualifiers run on courses with more than 1,500 feet of net elevation drop — a rule that has already pushed several American downhill races to flatten their courses.
Then there is the course itself: point-to-point from Hopkinton, net downhill, and therefore ineligible for world records. That did not stop John Korir running 2:01:52 in April to take his second straight title and demolish a course record that had stood since 2011. Sharon Lokedi also went back-to-back, winning in 2:18:51. Boston times mean something different from Berlin times, and everyone racing there knows it.
London — the biggest race on earth, and now the fastest
26 April 2026 · 46th edition · Entry: ballot, roughly 1.5% odds
Everything about London is now a record.
It is the largest marathon ever staged: 59,830 finishers crossed on The Mall in April, taking the Guinness record back from New York. Its ballot drew 1,133,813 applications for that race, a 36% jump on the previous world best, with fewer than one in twenty applicants successful. Organisers have floated running the 2027 edition across two days to push the field towards 100,000, though nothing has been approved.
And then there is what happened at the front. Sabastian Sawe ran 1:59:30 — the first sub-two-hour marathon in a record-eligible race, taking 65 seconds off the late Kelvin Kiptum's 2:00:35 and beating Eliud Kipchoge's unofficial Vienna exhibition by ten seconds. Yomif Kejelcha went 1:59:41 on debut. Jacob Kiplimo ran 2:00:28 for third. Three men, one race, the three fastest marathons ever run.
The women's race was almost as good and much closer: Tigst Assefa lowered her own women's-only world record to 2:15:41, holding off Hellen Obiri (2:15:53) and Joyciline Jepkosgei (2:15:55).
Sawe's team spent the build-up pre-empting the obvious question, funding additional testing through his sponsor. It is the state of the sport in 2026 that this was the sensible thing to do.
Cape Town — the eighth Major
23 May 2027 as a Major · Entry: ballot
The first Major on the African continent, and the one that took longest to arrive. Cape Town launched its candidacy in 2021 and cleared the final stage at the May 2026 edition, which drew 27,000 marathon runners and 44,500 participants across the full weekend of road and trail events.
It is not a soft course. It rolls, it is exposed, and the wind off the Atlantic decides how the day goes. That makes Huseyidin Mohamed Esa's winning 2:04:55 — the fastest marathon ever run on African soil — the more impressive. Dera Dida led an Ethiopian sweep of the women's podium in 2:23:18.
The race also hosted the AbbottWMM Age Group World Championships and, in a nice piece of symmetry, Eliud Kipchoge's first competitive marathon in Africa. He finished 16th, which was not the point.
Sydney — the harbour crossing
30 August 2026 · Entry: ballot, roughly 33% odds
Sydney is proof of what Major status does to a race. It had 5,306 entrants in 2022. It had 120,000 applications and around 40,000 runners this August, in only its second year in the series.
The 2026 edition was the fastest yet on Australian soil. Addisu Gobena — a javelin thrower until 2023, now 21 — won in a course-record 2:04:42, four seconds ahead of fellow Ethiopian Chimdessa Debele, with Lesotho's Tebello Ramakongoana third in 2:04:57. All three broke 2:05 on a course that crosses the Harbour Bridge and finishes at the Opera House. Peres Jepchirchir won the women's race in 2:18:31, her fourth Major title.
The moment of the weekend belonged to Manuela Schär, who won the women's wheelchair race in 1:42:04 to become the first athlete to win on all eight Major courses. Daniel Romanchuk took the men's race in a course-record 1:26:50.
Sydney remains the most accessible Major to enter. That will not last.
Berlin — the record factory
27 September 2026 · Entry: lottery, roughly 20–30% odds
Around 60,000 athletes from some 160 countries — runners, wheelchair racers, handbikers and inline skaters — on the flattest, straightest, best-paced course in the series. Berlin has produced more men's world records than any other venue, and it is where Assefa ran 2:11:53 in 2023, still the second-fastest marathon any woman has run and still the course record.
This year's field is absurd. Sawe returns to defend, with 1:59:30 next to his name. Twenty-five men on the start list have gone under 2:08. Olympic 10,000m champion Selemon Barega sits eighth on the entry rankings. Assefa heads the women's field and has said openly she is coming back for the outright world record; Rosemary Wanjiru defends, with 2023 world champion Amane Beriso alongside.
The outright women's record, 2:09:56, still belongs to Ruth Chepngetich from Chicago 2024. She is serving a three-year doping ban after testing positive for the diuretic hydrochlorothiazide in March 2025, but because the positive post-dates the run, the record stands. It is the uncomfortable asterisk hovering over every fast women's marathon this autumn.
Chicago — flat, cold, and built for time trials
11 October 2026 · 48th edition · Entry: lottery (~25%) or time qualifier
Seven world records have been set in Grant Park, most recently Chepngetich's. The formula is simple: no hills, wide roads, cool October mornings, and a race director who has never pretended to want anything other than fast times.
Demand has followed. More than 200,000 people applied for 2026, a record, with around 53,000 expected to finish. Defending champion Jacob Kiplimo returns off that 2:00:28 in London and a reclaimed half marathon world record. Six men in the field have broken 2:04. Hawi Feysa defends the women's title against Kosgei, back in Chicago for the first time since her dominant 2019 win, and Sharon Lokedi, making her Chicago debut and racing a genuinely flat Major for the first time in her career.
New York — the one that isn't fast
1 November 2026 · Entry: drawing, roughly 2–3% odds
Five boroughs, five bridges, no pacemakers, and a course that punishes anyone who treats the first half as free. New York is the only Major where the winning time is beside the point.
It is also enormous: 59,226 finishers in 2025, briefly the largest marathon in history before London took the record back six months later. More than 240,000 people applied for the 2026 drawing.
Benson Kipruto won in 2:08:09 last November; Hellen Obiri set a course record of 2:19:51. And in 17th place, in 2:14:36, Eliud Kipchoge finished his final Major — completing the full set of Majors on a debut appearance, then announcing on the finish line that he would spend the next two years running a marathon on each of the seven continents, Antarctica included, to raise a million dollars for his foundation. Cape Town in May was stop one.
Getting in: the honest odds
| Race | Next edition | Field | Main route | Rough odds |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Tokyo | March | ~38,000 | Weighted lottery | ~10% |
| Boston | 20 Apr 2027 | 30,000 | Qualifying time + cut-off | Time-dependent |
| London | April | ~60,000 | Ballot | ~1.5% |
| Cape Town | 23 May 2027 | ~27,000 | Ballot | New — expect a surge |
| Sydney | Late August | ~40,000 | Ballot | ~33% |
| Berlin | 27 Sep 2026 | ~60,000 | Lottery | ~20–30% |
| Chicago | 11 Oct 2026 | ~53,000 | Lottery / time qualifier | ~25% |
| New York | 1 Nov 2026 | ~59,000 | Drawing | ~2–3% |
Three routes bypass the lottery almost everywhere: charity places (expensive, and in London they raised £87.3 million in 2025), official tour operator packages with guaranteed entry, and time qualification, which most Majors offer at standards well short of Boston's. Abbott also runs its own draws for runners already partway through the Six Star chase.
Strategically: enter every ballot every year, treat Sydney, Berlin and Chicago as your realistic wins, budget for a tour package on London or New York, and start chasing a Boston qualifier five minutes faster than you think you need.
The majors that aren't Majors
The Abbott series is a marketing construct as much as a sporting one, and some of the best racing on earth sits outside it.
Valencia (December) is the fastest mass-participation marathon anywhere — 30,523 finishers in 2025, nearly 5,500 of them under three hours, a proportion no other race approaches. If you want a personal best, this is the answer and it isn't close.
Osaka (February) offers around 32,000 places, runs five to ten times oversubscribed, and finishes beside Osaka Castle. Paris (April) is the largest race outside the series at roughly 55,000. Amsterdam (October) starts and finishes in the 1928 Olympic Stadium on ten metres of total elevation gain. Rotterdam, Copenhagen and Seville all deliver Major-grade organisation without the two-year ballot wait.
There is no medal for these. There is also no lottery heartbreak, and the entry fees are a fraction of what a London charity place costs.
What's left in 2026
Berlin on 27 September, with Sawe chasing his own ghost and Assefa chasing Chepngetich's. Chicago on 11 October with the deepest field in that race's history. New York on 1 November to close the season. Shanghai on 6 December, where a passed evaluation makes nine.
Twelve months ago the two-hour marathon was a hypothetical and the Majors were six races on three continents. Now the barrier is broken, the series spans five continents, and the honest question for the front of the sport is no longer whether anyone goes faster — it is how soon, and whether we will believe it when they do.