Kenya loses bid to host 2025 World Athletics Championships
Left to right- Athletics Kenya President Jackson Tuwei, Kenya's Minister of Sport, Culture and Heritage Amina Mohamed, World Athletics President Sebastian Coe and Kirimi Kaberia, then Sports PS, in Monaco in 2019.
What you need to know:
- The World Athletics Council handed Tokyo, that hosted the delayed 2020 Olympic Games last year, the rights to host the 2025 World Athletics Championships
- The Council sitting in Oregon, United States, also handed the 2024 World Cross Country Championships to Pula and Medulin, Croatia with Florida, United States getting to stage the 2026 World Cross Country Championships
- This effectively means Africa will have to wait longer in order to host World Championships event
Nairobi has lost the bid to host the 2025 World Athletics Championships.
The World Athletics Council Thursday handed Tokyo, that hosted the delayed 2020 Olympic Games last year, the rights to host the 2025 World Athletics Championships.
The Council sitting in Oregon, United States, also handed the 2024 World Cross Country Championships to Pula and Medulin, Croatia with Florida, United States getting to stage the 2026 World Cross Country Championships.
This effectively means Africa will have to wait longer in order to host World Championships event.
The other candidates for the event were Nairobi, Silesia and Singapore, all of which were deemed strong enough and experienced enough to host the event.
The 2023 World Championships shall be held in Budapest, Hungary a year after Oregon.
Tokyo scored the highest of the four candidates in the bid evaluation across the four focused areas: the potential for a powerful narrative; revenue generating opportunities for World Athletics; a destination that will enhance the international profile of the sport; and appropriate climate.
The announcement was made on the second day of the 228th World Athletics Council Meeting in Oregon, USA, where the Council also announced that the 2024 World Athletics Cross Country Championships will be held in Medulin and Pula in Croatia and the 2026 World Athletics Cross Country Championships will be held in Tallahassee, Florida, USA.
The 2025 World Athletics Championships will see the sport’s biggest stars return to Tokyo’s Olympic Stadium, venue for last year’s Olympic Games, in the year that the Japanese Association of Athletics Federations (JAAF) celebrates its centenary year.
In 2025, Tokyo will have the opportunity to fill its Olympic stadium with athletics fans who were denied the opportunity to attend the Tokyo 2020 Olympic Games due to pandemic restrictions last year.
World Athletics President Sebastian Coe thanked all the cities who took the time and effort to prepare bids, showing their commitment to athletics. He reinforced the Council's wish that all of them continue to discuss future opportunities to host World Athletics events.
“Within an extremely strong field of candidates to host the World Athletics Championships 2025, Tokyo offered a compelling bid,” Coe said. “I hope this will be a shining light for Japan as they celebrate 100 years of the Japanese Association of Athletics Federations (JAAF) in 2025, by bringing world-class athletics back to the people in Tokyo.”
The staging of the 46th World Athletics Cross Country Championships in Tallahassee in 2026 adds to the roster of world-class track and field events being held in the United States and helps to enhance World Athletics' ambition to become a top five sport in the USA by 2028, the year of the Los Angeles Olympic Games.
The World Athletics Cross Country Championships will return to the USA for the first time since 1992, when Boston hosted the event. New York also staged the event in 1984.
Kenya has successfully hosted the World Cross Country Championships in 2007, World Under-18 Championships in 2017, the World Under-20 Championships (2021), Kip Keino Classic World Continental Gold Tour (2020 and 2021) and the World Cross Country Tour (2022).
Additional reporting by World Athletics.
