The 2027 London Marathon Will Be Britain’s Trial for the World Championships and the Olympics

UK Athletics will pick its marathon team for the 2027 World Championships in Beijing at next year’s London Marathon, the federation announced Thursday, and the same race will start the selection process for the 2028 Olympic Games in Los Angeles. London will again stage the UK Athletics Marathon Championships, where Mahamed Mahamed and Eilish McColgan retained their titles in April.

As we have reported, organizers split the 2027 edition across two days after a record 1,338,544 ballot applications, and on Wednesday a game of rock, paper, scissors between Sabastian Sawe and Catherine Debrunner settled the running order: elite men on Saturday, April 24, and elite women on Sunday, April 25. Britain’s trial will therefore run over a weekend too, with the men’s team decided a full day before the women’s.

Hugh Brasher, chief executive of London Marathon Events, said the selection status gave the event “another unique dimension.” “The country’s best marathon runners will also be racing for places at not one, but two major global championships,” he said.

Only Mo Farah Has Run Under the Men’s Standard

The top two British finishers in each race will be selected for Beijing, which runs Sept. 10 to 19, as long as each has the World Athletics entry standard of 2:06:00 for men and 2:23:20 for women. That time can come on the day or from any race since Nov. 3, 2025, under the UK Athletics selection policy, and a top-two finisher without it does not hand the place down to the next Briton by default. Britain can send up to three athletes per event, and remaining places are decided in a later round, where a World Athletics ranking position backed by a British consideration time of 2:07:30 or 2:24:30 also counts.

Mo Farah is still the only Briton to have broken 2:06:00, and his 2:05:11 British record from Chicago in 2018 shows how much the men’s standard asks of the current crop. Mahamed got within 14 seconds of it when he won the national title in April, running 2:06:14 to move to second on the British all-time list, and Patrick Dever was just four seconds behind him in 2:06:18. Emile Cairess, who ran 2:06:46 for third in London in 2024, missed this year’s race with a calf injury, the second year in a row he has had to withdraw.

McColgan won in 2:24:51 despite a blister she said made her foot “explode,” and that run was 91 seconds slower than the Beijing time, which leaves the women’s standard looking just as hard to reach on current form. Rose Harvey was second in 2:26:14. Calli Hauger-Thackery’s 2:21:24 from Berlin in 2024 falls outside the qualifying window, and she raced Boston in April while 22 weeks pregnant.

That is a different route from 2025, when British Athletics picked Cairess and Hauger-Thackery for the Tokyo World Championships in May on their results over the previous year, which included Cairess’s fourth place at the Paris Olympics and Hauger-Thackery’s 2:22:38 in Boston.

A Provisional Place for Los Angeles

The first British man and the first British woman in London will be “pre-selected” for Los Angeles if they hold the Olympic qualifying times, which have not been released yet and are expected by the end of the year. That place is provisional, and they will then have to back it up with races in 2028, not necessarily marathons, before UK Athletics confirms the nomination for Olympic marathons scheduled for July 2028.

Tom Craggs, UK Athletics’ endurance performance lead, said London gave British athletes “a fantastic platform” in a race he called “the greatest marathon in the world.”

“British marathon running continues to go from strength to strength, and we look forward to seeing athletes take on this unique opportunity to compete for both national titles and world and Olympic selection,” Craggs said.

The full Olympic selection policy, with the details of what pre-selected athletes must run in 2028, will be released later.