Copenhagen Half Marathon Moves to a Lottery for Its 2027 Race

The Copenhagen Half Marathon will allocate its 2027 entries by random draw, ending the on-sale rush that decided the race through 2025 and adding another major European road race to the list that now runs a lottery.

Registration opens Wednesday, Sept. 16, three days before Copenhagen hosts the World Road Running Championships on the same streets, and closes Sept. 30. Entering costs nothing and commits a runner to nothing. Organizers will start emailing the runners they draw on Oct. 5, and each one gets 48 hours to claim the place and pay DKK 795 plus a 5 percent administration fee, which works out to about $130. You can enter alone or in a group of up to three, and a group is drawn together or not at all.

Sparta Athletics & Running says 45,000 runners will start on Sunday, Sept. 19, 2027. The 2025 edition, the last one run under the old system, took more than 33,000 registrations and put 31,743 starters on the line, a race record at the time, according to the organizer’s own figures. Copenhagen is adding something close to 13,000 places to the biggest field it has ever staged and going to a lottery anyway.

It is not the city’s first draw. The mass half-marathon attached to the 2026 World Championships was balloted back in March 2025, with 35,000 places on offer, a decision Sparta made after the 2025 race sold out in only two and a half hours. “The lottery ensures a fair and equal chance for everyone,” Dorte Vibjerg, the chief executive of Sparta Athletics & Running, said when that ballot opened.

Copenhagen Is Dropping Bib Resale Entirely

There will be no resale platform for CPH Half 2027. An entry belongs to the runner it is issued to and cannot be passed to anyone else, which removes the fallback that heavily oversubscribed races have leaned on for years. Runners who find they cannot make the start line are pointed toward optional insurance from a third-party provider, Refundable.me, and that is the whole of the safety net.

Copenhagen’s other big road race did the same thing four months ago. Copenhagen Marathon went to a lottery for 2027 in May after its 2026 entries disappeared in 23 hours, and it shut down its resale platform at the same time, citing fraud on the old system and the rules of the European Marathon Classics group, which does not permit resale. Sparta organizes both events. From 2027, neither of Copenhagen’s flagship races will offer any route to a bib except winning one in a draw.

The Rest of the SuperHalfs Have Already Gone This Way

Copenhagen is one of six races in the SuperHalfs series, and it is only the latest of them to give up on selling entries in real time. Berlin and Lisbon both balloted their 2026 races. The Generali Prague Half Marathon closed its 2027 ballot on Aug. 12 with more than 70,000 applications, 77 percent of them from outside the Czech Republic and spread across 161 countries. “The ballot system is a proven standard worldwide and is typically a response to extreme demand as well as an effort to create fair conditions for everyone,” RunCzech organizers said when the numbers came in.

The series has been blunt about the reasoning. Several SuperHalfs races sold out within hours under first-come, first-served, and SuperHalfs organizers wrote last year that the old method quietly favored whoever had the free hour, the fast connection and the convenient time zone.

None of which settles the argument over whether lotteries are actually fairer, a debate the London Marathon reopened when its 2026 ballot drew more than 1.1 million applications. For anyone mapping out a 2027 season, the practical effect is that the list of big races you can still enter on demand has got shorter again.

Missing out on Oct. 5 does not end it. Sparta says a runner stays live in the draw until an outright rejection lands, and any place freed up when a 48-hour window lapses goes back into the pool to be drawn again.