The LA28 Olympic Marathons Will Have 10 Fewer Places Than Paris

World Athletics set out the road to the LA28 Olympic marathon this week, with qualifying opening on Nov. 1 and the time standards due in December. Tucked into those rules, first reported by CITIUS Mag, was a number that will shape the whole chase: each race in Los Angeles has a target of 70 places, down from 80 in Paris.

Only a decade ago, Rio 2016 had the biggest Olympic marathon fields ever, with 155 men and 156 women on the start line. Tokyo’s races in Sapporo had 106 men and 88 women, and Paris had 81 men and 91 women. If the men’s race in Los Angeles starts with 70, it would be the smallest Olympic men’s marathon since 67 lined up in Montreal in 1976, and a women’s field of 70 would be the smallest since 53 started in Sydney in 2000.

The IOC capped athletics at 1,810 athletes for Paris, down from 1,900 in Tokyo, and the LA28 program keeps that 1,810 figure while adding a new mixed 4x100m relay. The race walks change shape too, with a half-marathon walk replacing the 20K and the mixed team walk dropped. The rules sent to agents don’t say where the 20 marathon places went.

Tokyo was meant to have 80 per race as well, yet World Athletics counted 110 men and 103 women as qualified when that window shut in 2021. For Paris, the IOC handed out universality places at the end of the window, 11 for men and nine for women, and World Athletics then added four more men after checking which qualified athletes planned to race more than one event. Both Paris races finished up above the quota once those extras were in, so 70 is best read as a target rather than a final start list.

World Athletics wants about 40 percent of each LA28 field to come through the standard or by placing in the top five at a Platinum Label race, which leaves just 28 or so places per race for those routes, compared with 40 out of 80 in Paris. Even 40 proved too few there, because by the end of the Paris window so many runners had the standard that neither marathon was expected to take anyone off the world rankings, and the U.S. men were left with only two places once the universality spots went out.

Next year’s marathons at the World Championships in Beijing have a target of 100 runners each, with standards of 2:06:00 for men and 2:23:20 for women, so the Olympic races in Los Angeles will be about 30 places smaller than the world title races held a year earlier.

The World Athletics Council is due to approve the LA28 standards in December, a month after the qualifying window opens on the same day as the New York City Marathon.