By Kyle Merber
March 11, 2026
For a year without a World Championship, there sure are a lot of world championships on the schedule for 2026.
There was a World Cross Country Championship. There’s about to be a World Indoor Championship. We’ve got the World Road Running Championships coming up this summer. And let’s not overlook World Relays, the Commonwealth Games, or the European Championships!
Oh, and you can’t forget the World Ultimate Championships! We’re not quite sold on the name but love the concept for one simple reason: the best athletes in the world will be on the track together.
“Is that really a novel concept?” you ask. “What about the Olympics? The athletes who line up there are the best of the best!”
Tell that to the fourth best steeplechaser in Kenya. Or how about an even more extreme example: In 2016, the United States women swept the Olympic podium in the 100m hurdles. The next four fastest athletes in the world that year were also American. They just never got their shot due to the Olympics’ hard cap on three athletes per event per country.
The World Ultimate qualification format rewards athletes for being the fastest globally, not being the top-three fastest in their country. And with more and more athletes switching national allegiances to chase greater opportunities, it feels less and less like per-country event caps is a meaningful constraint.
Sure, the Olympics, its brand of sport-based patriotism, and its ten days of competition create one hell of a spectacle. But without prelims or repechage rounds, the three-night format of the World Ultimate Championships is simpler and far more digestible. We can also watch comfortably with the knowledge that we are truly seeing the top athletes across every a selection of events. A championship that can truly tout the best of the best and none of the rest.
The universality of represented nations is an important and core part of the Olympics, and this is not an argument to change that. But outside of that particular four-year cycle, the sport still exists as a professional enterprise, and professional sports do not generally have quotas.
World Athletics’s goal should be to create the best product possible by having the best athletes competing against one another. The world rankings system will grind World Ultimate fields down to 16 entrants, and though the rankings system has its issues, conceptually this should create a narrative and foster investment in the “regular season” that wasn’t previously there.
The World Championships—or World “Long Track” Championships, as we call them around here—attempt to strike a balance between Olympic-style inclusion and ruthless meritocracy by virtue of inviting reigning champs and a smattering of other wild-card entrants to the line. Because of that, winning a World Championships in a non-marathon event is arguably harder than winning Olympic gold.
By comparison, let’s take a slightly-exasperated look at the World Indoor/Short Track Championships, set for March 20th–22nd. The qualifying window opened in November, which, unless you are Josh Hoey, is not a real consideration for starting your competitive campaign. Instead, in practice, there were about six weeks in which top athletes chased the entry standards and in most cases, those athletes took two attempts at securing their times. That ultimately makes leveraging world rankings borderline impossible.
The qualifying times are generally quite achievable for any serious contender. For example, the target time of 4:06.00 for the women’s 1500m was surpassed by 111 women during the entirety of 2025, and 172 men ran under the 1:45.90 mark for the 800m. But the conundrum is that the large majority of those physically capable of doing so, choose to skip the World Indoor Championships… despite it being an “off-year!”
The reality is that indoor track is not a priority for many corners of the world, even when there’s little else to look forward to. So why are we not making room for those who are enthusiastic about indoors, especially when it means also raising the level of competition?
Nico Young has the sixth-fastest 3000m time in the world this indoor season (he’s ranked fifth in the mile), but will be watching World Indoors from home because he’s from a country loaded with talent that also values the indoor season. Meanwhile, Kenya made no attempt to fill out their team. The incentives are out of whack and rather than ensuring a potential gold medalist lines up, World Athletics will go deep down the depth chart to find someone with no shot at contributing to an exciting race.
The World Indoor Championships would benefit from following the lead of the NCAA and select entrants strictly off a descending order list, regardless of how many 3000m runners are from Oregon. There’s financial value in having a diversity of countries represented at major championships, and that’s okay because there can still be methods for allocated entries in the same way they’re done outdoors. Just don’t get upset at Nico when he switches allegiance to Bahrain because he’d like to vie for a medal at the World Championships.
Hot Take: The fastest runners in the world should be at Worlds.
Kyle Merber
After hanging up his spikes – but never his running shoes – Kyle pivoted to the media side of things, where he shares his enthusiasm, insights, and experiences with subscribers of The Lap Count newsletter, as well as viewers of CITIUS MAG live shows.
