The Boston Athletic Association has released the first names for the 130th Boston Marathon, and the top of the field is unusually complete this early.
Boston will bring back both defending champions from the 2025 race, Sharon Lokedi and John Korir, and line them up alongside the current American record holders, Conner Mantz and Emily Sisson. It’s the kind of group the race rarely gets to assemble in one year.
Lokedi returns after the kind of run that can change a career.
Now, Lokedi has always been a runner that’s thrived on challenging courses like Boston and New York, but her 2:17:22 victory in April broke a course record that had survived since 2014 and truly brought her name to the forefront.
She backed it up with a second-place finish at the 2025 New York City Marathon, showing that her Boston breakthrough wasn’t a one-off. Boston has seen its share of strong champions, but Lokedi enters 2026 as one of the safest bets in the field.
And Korir’s win last year was memorable for different reasons.
He fell within the first hundred meters, regrouped immediately, and still managed to pull away late to close in 2:04:45. That’s the third-fastest time ever run in Boston, in case you’re wondering. That performance made him and his brother, 2012 champion Wesley Korir, the first siblings to win the race.
His form has only sharpened, for the most part, since, after a tough DNF in Chicago, he went on to win the 2025 Valencia Marathon in 2:02:24, the eighth-fastest marathon in history.
The American record holders give this year’s field an added boost of excitment on a home soil race. Mantz was fourth in Boston last April in 2:05:08, the best finish by an American man in seven years, and spent the rest of the season proving that wasn’t his ceiling.
His 2:04:43 in Chicago later this season broke the U.S. marathon record and added to a resume that already included the American half-marathon record, among others. Boston is one of the few places he hasn’t finished on the podium, an achievement he was just four seconds away from changing in 2025.
Sisson enters Boston for the first time, though the course won’t feel unfamiliar. She spent her college years at Providence and has raced repeatedly in New England. Her 2:18:29 in Chicago in 2022 still stands as the American record, and her Olympic and Major results since then show a steady pattern of solid racing. Boston has waited a while to get her on the start list, and 2026 finally delivers that matchup.
B.A.A. CEO Jack Fleming called the early lineup one of the strongest collections of international and American talent the race has assembled. It’s too early to talk tactics or pace groups, but the presence of both defending champions and both national record holders guarantees a sharper edge to the front of the field than Boston sees most years.
The rest of the professional field will be announced in January, but the headline names already give a clear picture of what kind of race Boston is building toward next spring, one with speed, history, and a set of athletes arriving in some of the best form of their careers.
