Runners Say the Melbourne Marathon Ran Out of Water on a Warm Sunday

Eliud Kipchoge gave the Melbourne Marathon the finish it wanted on Sunday, a course record and a wave to the crowd inside the Melbourne Cricket Ground. Plenty of the runners behind him will remember the day for something else, with drink stations running short of water on a day that warmed into the mid-70s.

The complaints started on social media within hours, and news.com.au rounded up a number of them on Monday. One came from a volunteer, who said the race’s water supply was gone by about the half-marathon start and that stations had to hand out what remained sparingly. A runner wrote that there was no water at all between 8K and 25K. Another clip showed a runner who had left the course to pay for his own drinks.

“We’ve got the unofficial pacers buying drinks for people in the marathon,” @theotherbrady said in a video he recorded during the race. He thanked the volunteers, then turned to the organizers: “You guys did not equip them to support everyone on the course and it’s a hot day for a marathon, and that was really disappointing.”

Video from one corner showed the field backed up so badly that runners were walking through it, and another showed someone squeezed off the road entirely and running on the footpath. Others wanted more portable toilets and said leaving the MCG after the finish took far too long. “Melbourne marathon is a joke,” wrote @Endurancerunerr, a four-time finisher, on TikTok. “As for the event organisers. They should be ashamed.”

A Later Start on Shared Stations

The half-marathon left Batman Avenue at 9:45 a.m. Last year it started at 7:30 a.m., which means this year’s half-marathon field ran more than two hours deeper into a warming day. At the Bureau of Meteorology’s Olympic Park station, a short walk from the MCG, it was 63 F (17.1 C) with 63 percent humidity at 9 a.m. and 76 F (24.2 C) by 3 p.m., with a northerly wind picking up through the afternoon. Conditions like those push up how much a runner needs to drink over a long race.

The two races also drew on the same drink stations. The half-marathon had five stations before the finish, at 5.5K, 7K, 13K, 15.2K and 20K, and four of those sites (St Kilda Road at Roy Street, Ross Gregory Drive, Lakeside Drive and Wellington Street South) also served the marathon. The marathon had started at 6:15 a.m. and gave its runners until 2 p.m. to reach the MCG, so slower marathoners were still coming through those stations when the half-marathon arrived. Across its full distance the marathon had 12 stations, and five of them sat inside the 8K to 25K stretch where that one runner reported finding nothing.

A New Owner and a Rebuilt Course

Sunday was the first Melbourne Marathon since IMG, which had owned the race since 2006, sold it to Ari Emanuel’s company MARI in a deal announced in November 2025. The course was rebuilt for this year, cutting about 20 percent of the climbing and taking out the hill near 36K, and the race became the Oceania stop on Kipchoge’s world tour.

Chicago went through a far worse version of this in 2007, when aid stations were overwhelmed in 88 F heat, runners bought water at convenience stores, and organizers stopped the race. Forty-nine runners needed hospital care. The next year Chicago went from 15 aid stations to 20 and introduced a color-coded alert system, which opened at yellow ahead of this year’s race. Melbourne did not publish a heat policy for either of its long races, and organizers had not responded publicly to the complaints by Monday.