Good newsSub-Two-Hour Marathon and 3:42.66 Mile Are Moment of the Year Finalists
World Athletics named three finalists for its first Moment of the Year award: Sabastian Sawe’s 1:59:30 marathon, Josh Kerr’s 3:42.66 mile and Botswana’s home 4x400m relay win. The winner is announced in Monaco on 29 November.
This story runs on the good side only. The biggest stories of the day are told on both sides.
Athletics has spent 2026 breaking barriers that were meant to hold for a generation, and now it has a prize for the night it felt best. World Athletics confirmed on Tuesday three finalists for the inaugural Moment of the Year award. Two are world records run in London. The third is a relay win in front of a home crowd in Botswana, according to the governing body’s announcement.
The winner will be named on stage at the World Athletics Awards in Monaco on 29 November. The finalists were chosen after a fan vote on the official World Athletics app, so the shortlist reflects what spectators said they remembered, not a jury’s taste.
What the award is for
World Athletics describes the new honour as a celebration of the most memorable occasion of the season. It says the moment may go beyond a single performance and inspire fans around the world. That wording matters. It lets a relay team and a lone record-breaker compete for the same trophy, and it rewards the atmosphere in the stadium as much as the stopwatch.
The three finalists
| Finalist | Where and when | Mark | What it beat |
|---|---|---|---|
| Sabastian Sawe (Kenya), marathon | London, April | 1:59:30, first competitive marathon under two hours | Kelvin Kiptum’s 2:00:35 from 2023 |
| Josh Kerr (Great Britain), mile | London Diamond League, July | 3:42.66 | Hicham El Guerrouj’s record, 27 years old, by almost half a second |
| Botswana, men’s 4x400m relay | World Athletics Relays, at home | Gold | Not a record, but a title won in front of a home crowd |
Sources: World Athletics; BBC Sport.
Sawe: two hours, broken
BBC Sport reports that Sawe, 31, won the London Marathon in April in 1 hour 59 minutes 30 seconds. That is more than a minute faster than Kiptum’s previous world record of 2:00:35, set in 2023. The pace works out at about 2 minutes 50 seconds per kilometre for 42.195 kilometres, by our arithmetic.
The race itself was unusual. Ethiopia’s Yomif Kejelcha also finished under two hours in second place, and third-placed Jacob Kiplimo also beat the previous world record, the BBC says. So three men went faster than anyone had in history in one race, and two of them are inside a barrier that was long treated as unreachable.
Kerr: a stadium that sang
Kerr, 29, ran 3:42.66 at the London Diamond League in July. He smashed the 27-year-old mile record held by Morocco’s El Guerrouj by almost half a second. The BBC says the home crowd cheered him on throughout at the London Stadium. Kerr’s time is a speed of about 26 kilometres an hour, held for 1.6 kilometres.
Botswana: a title at home
The third finalist is not a record. Botswana won the men’s 4x400m relay title at the World Athletics Relays in front of a home crowd, the BBC reports. A small country winning a global title in its own stadium is the kind of moment the new award was built to capture.
What the shortlist says about the year
Taken together the three finalists show three different kinds of progress. Sawe’s race showed that a long-held limit can move, and moved it by more than a minute. Kerr’s showed that a mark that stood for 27 years can still fall in a single night with the crowd pushing. Botswana’s showed that the sport’s big moments are not only about world records.
It is also a sign of how much the sport has to celebrate. The awards night in Monaco will present other honours as well: men’s and women’s World Athlete of the Year, Rising Star, Coach of the Year and the President’s Award, according to World Athletics.
What happens next
The Moment of the Year winner will be announced live on stage on 29 November. World Athletics has not said how the final decision will be made, or whether fans will vote again. The announcement does not say how many fans took part in the first round.
If you want to judge the finalists yourself, the records are the easy part: the times are on the books and on video. The harder question is the one the new award is asking. Which of the three would you tell someone about first?
