Prague’s First Half-Marathon Ballot Drew 70,000 Applications in Three Weeks

Prague will decide who runs its 2027 half-marathon with a random draw next week, ending a system that for years rewarded whoever could click fastest. Applications closed just before midnight on Aug. 11, and organizers put the total above 70,000, as reported by Prague Daily News.

It is the first ballot in the race’s history. Places at the Prague Half-Marathon, held on April 3, 2027, were previously sold first-come, first-served. Applying costs nothing. Runners who are drawn have seven days to pay 2,000 Czech koruna (about $96) or forfeit their place.

How many places the draw actually covers is not published on the race’s website. The 2026 edition was capped at 17,000 runners, and the ballot rules reserve entries for charity programs, commercial partners, tour operators, elite athletes and the race’s loyalty program, none of which go through the draw. The rules do not say how many. Set against a pool of more than 70,000, that is odds of roughly one in four at the very best, and lower once the reserved places come out.

The 70,000 figure is large, but it is not the largest number this race has produced. Registration for the 2026 edition opened in September 2025 and sold out in about four hours. A year earlier, the same race had taken about four weeks to fill.

Carlo Capalbo, president of the RunCzech organizing committee, said when the change was announced in July that under the old system, “Success often depended on just a few seconds, the speed of an internet connection, or simply being online at the right moment,” and that the ballot was meant to provide fairer conditions, in comments reported by Prague Daily News.

The lottery arrives at the end of a long climb. The race drew 718 runners at its first edition in March 1999, 4,243 in 2008, 12,000 in 2016 and 13,494 in 2024, which was a record at the time. It set another record with 16,000 in 2025 before hitting its 17,000 cap in 2026, when runners from 117 countries started. Roughly 24 times as many people run it now as ran the first one. The limit on the field is no longer the number of runners who want in; it is the number the city can put on the road on a Saturday morning. London’s marathon ballot, the largest in the sport, drew 1,338,544 applications for 2027, up 18 percent on the 1.13 million that set the record a year before.

Roughly 45 percent of the entries came from runners carrying a SuperHalfs passport, the free tracker for a six-race European series Prague belongs to alongside Lisbon, Berlin, Copenhagen, Cardiff and Valencia. The passport logs which of the six a runner has finished. It carries no entry rights, and the series is not one of the groups, alongside charities and tour operators, that RunCzech keeps outside the draw. Czech runners accounted for 23 percent of the applications, with the other 77 percent filed from outside the country, spread across 161 nations. The United Kingdom supplied the biggest foreign contingent, ahead of Germany. Brazilians sent in almost 1,300 entries and American runners more than 700.

The draw takes place in the week beginning Aug. 17, and RunCzech has said every applicant will get the outcome by email by Aug. 21. Runners who miss out get a second route in September, when the race publishes the terms for its loyalty program and its charity partners, the places that never entered the ballot in the first place.