Nairobi Will Host the First World Athletics Championships in Africa

World Athletics has awarded the 2029 World Championships to Nairobi, putting its biggest competition in Africa for the first time since the championships began in 1983. The governing body’s Council, meeting in Budapest on Monday and Tuesday, gave Munich the 2031 edition in the same session.

Four cities were in for 2029: Nairobi, London, Rome and Munich. London’s was the heavily engineered bid: the London Stadium, £45 million ($60.5 million) of public money from the Treasury and the mayor’s office, and a negotiated truce with West Ham United over access to the ground in football season. British Athletics submitted the final documents on Aug. 6, five weeks before the vote, and two months after Josh Kerr broke the mile world record in the same stadium. “We are deeply disappointed that the 2029 World Athletics Championships will not be held in London,” UK Athletics chief executive Jack Buckner said in comments reported by The Independent. “We believed we had an outstanding bid which would genuinely take the sport to new levels.”

Rome leaves empty-handed for the second time in three years. It pulled its 2027 candidacy in February 2024 when the Italian government would not guarantee the roughly $92 million the meet would have cost at the Stadio Olimpico, according to the Associated Press, and Beijing took that edition instead.

What Altitude Will Do to the Meet

The championships go to the Moi International Sports Centre at Kasarani, the stadium built for the 1987 All-Africa Games and currently being rebuilt end to end before the 2027 Africa Cup of Nations. It sits a little above 1,600 meters above sea level. World Athletics treats any performance set above 1,000 m as altitude-assisted in its own statistical conventions and tags it with an “A” in the results. No senior World Championships has been held that high. Nairobi will be the first whose entire results file carries the mark.

Thin air helps sprinters and horizontal jumpers, which is why marks from the 1968 Mexico City Olympics took decades to beat. It does the opposite to anyone racing 1,500m and upward, and those are the events Kenya is famous for. The distance finals will be slower and more tactical, in a stadium full of people who came to watch Kenyans win them.

The Last World Championships Marathon

One consequence of Tuesday’s decision went unmentioned in Budapest. World Athletics confirmed in April that the marathon will move to its own standalone championships from 2030, with Athens the preferred host of the first edition. “From 2031 onwards, the marathon, or any other road running distance, will no longer form part of the World Athletics Championships,” the governing body said at the time.

Nairobi 2029 is therefore the last World Championships to stage a marathon, and it will be run in Kenya, at altitude. Munich 2031 becomes the first edition in the championships’ history with no road event at all.

Kenya’s Case for Hosting

Kasarani held the World U18 Championships in 2017 and the World U20 Championships in 2021. Nairobi bid for the 2025 championships, lost to Tokyo, and came back with a better proposition for 2029. Kenya was second in the Tokyo 2025 medal table with seven golds and 11 medals in total, including Faith Kipyegon’s fourth world 1500m title and Beatrice Chebet’s 5,000m win.

“Nairobi presented a compelling and emotional bid, and taking the World Athletics Championships to Africa for the first time will be historic,” World Athletics president Sebastian Coe said in the announcement. “Kenya is one of the great athletics nations.”

The championships also go to a federation the Athletics Integrity Unit still lists in Category A, its highest-risk tier for doping, alongside Belarus, Bahrain, Ethiopia, India, Nigeria, Russia and Ukraine. Athletes from those countries carry the heaviest out-of-competition testing obligations in the sport, and Kenya’s own anti-doping agency barred 20 athletes from the 2025 national trials for not completing it. World Athletics did not address the issue in Tuesday’s announcement.

Munich Takes 2031

This will be Germany’s third World Championships, after Stuttgart in 1993 and Berlin in 2009. The Olympiastadion, built for the 1972 Games, staged the athletics at the 2022 European Championships and drew around 267,000 spectators across the week, with the host nation finishing top of the medal table. Coe called it “one of the iconic venues in world sport.”

All three of the next editions fall in September, part of World Athletics’ effort to end the season on a global championship rather than open with one. Beijing goes first, on Sept. 10-19, 2027.