If all goes well when the biggest marathon field ever gathered in Australia races 42km through the streets of Sydney on Sunday, World Marathon Majors (WMM) will soon add a seventh race to the elite series.
The Sydney Marathon is to become the first race since Tokyo in 2013 to join long-established majors in New York, London, Boston, Berlin and Chicago if it passes the WMM assessment criteria for the second straight year.
“We’re really excited for Sunday to arrive,” race director Wayne Larden told a news conference in Sydney yesterday. “We’re prepared, we’re ready. All of our plans look good on paper, I feel we’re ticking all the boxes. So we’ve just got to go out there now and deliver the event as per the plans and I’m sure we’ll meet the criteria.”
Photo: Reuters
Larden has been race director since 2005 when there were 2,300 finishers and has overseen the race’s growth to the 25,000 runners who are to test themselves over a newly rejigged course on Sunday.
“It’s taken me 18 years to build it to 5,000 and two years to get it to 25,000,” Larden told reporters. “So the trajectory has been very steep in the last two years since we became a candidate race, because there’s a lot of excitement about the world majors being in Sydney.”
The size of the field and a new start location — at North Sydney Oval where the Olympic marathon got under way in 2000 — would make the task a bit harder for Larden and his team, but he is optimistic they will deliver.
“I’m feeling confident, but it’s a big event and anything can happen. But I think we’re well prepared for it,” he said. “I will pretty well know on race day how we’ve gone, based on our plans and how we’ve delivered them.”
The WMM series started in 2006 and the candidacy program was introduced in 2017 with the idea of bringing the total number of races to a maximum of nine.
“It’s World Marathon Majors, and the word ‘world’ is in there, and we are not really worldwide, right?” WMM chief executive Dawna Stone told reporters outside the Sydney Opera House. “We were looking around the world and saying: ‘Where are we not and where maybe should we be to bring more access to individuals that want to take place in a major.’”
Stone’s assessment team is to be on the ground in Sydney on Sunday and a decision on whether the race gets the nod is expected next month.
“What better place to be than [an] iconic city like this that everybody wants to go to?” Stone added. “If everything goes according to plan, I am hopeful that they will become the next major.”
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