Athlos Cancels the New York Meet That Started the League

Athlos has cancelled its New York meet, the event it started the league with in 2024. The women’s-only series said Friday that the Oct. 2 date at Icahn Stadium will not go ahead, and that from 2027 it wants its meets inside the main athletics calendar rather than after it.

Athlos London, on Sept. 18 at StoneX Stadium in Barnet, north London, is now the entire 2026 season. That meet is still on, and the BBC will carry it live after being named the series’ UK broadcast partner on Aug. 7. In a statement posted to X, first published by The Athletic, Athlos said: “Our goal is that, starting in the 2027 season, Athlos events will move to be aligned with the global athletics calendar.”

The London field is unchanged. Keely Hodgkinson, the Olympic 800m champion and Athlos’s defending 800m winner, headlines a card that also includes Sha’Carri Richardson, Gabby Thomas, Tara Davis-Woodhall, Georgia Hunter Bell and Amber Anning.

Alexis Ohanian, the Reddit co-founder who launched the series in 2024, said in a video posted to his own accounts that the decision was his. “We built ATHLOS at the very end of the season to give athletes one more go at peak performance,” he said. “Based on feedback from y’all, we now understand it’s the hardest possible place to be asking you all to show up at your best.”

The Diamond League final is in Brussels on Sept. 4 and 5, the inaugural World Athletics Ultimate Championship runs in Budapest from Sept. 11 to 13, and Athlos London follows on Sept. 18. New York would have come on Oct. 2, 19 days after Budapest and 14 days after London. An athlete entered in all four would have had to peak four times in 29 days.

The Budapest meet pays $10 million over three evenings, $150,000 of it to the winner of each event. Winning an Athlos meet is worth $65,000. World Athletics created the Ultimate Championship in part as an answer to the high-paying private meets that arrived in 2024, and it now occupies the end-of-season slot Athlos was set up to fill.

The 2026 season was announced in May as a two-city series with a $2.1 million prize pool and points at each meet on a 10-8-6-4-2-1 basis. The athlete with the highest total across the two meets was to take $25,000 and a Tiffany & Co. crown, on top of the equity stake in the league that Athlos gives its competitors. Athlos has not said how the series title will be decided with one meet left, what becomes of the second meet’s prize money, or how the equity is now allocated. As of Saturday neither its press page nor its event page mentioned the cancellation.

Icahn Stadium seats 5,000. StoneX seats 10,500, Athlos says it is close to selling out, and it is the meet the BBC is carrying.

Ohanian said planning for a New York return in 2027 has already begun, alongside other events he did not specify. That calendar is already crowded. The 2026 Diamond League ran from May 16 to Sept. 5 across 15 meetings, and the 2027 World Athletics Championships are in Beijing from Sept. 11 to 19.