Athletics at the Aichi-Nagoya Asian Games begins on 23 September and runs to 29 September, with 50 medal events split across track and field, road running and race walking. Paloma Mizuho Stadium in Nagoya hosts the stadium programme and serves as the start and finish for the marathons, while the race walks use a loop course between the Aichi Prefectural Government Office and Nagoya City Hall.
The marathons fall on Saturday 26 September, with the men's race starting at 07:30 and the women's at 07:50. Those start times are a concession to a Japanese late September that can still deliver humidity well into the twenties, and they place the marathons at the front of a weekend that organisers have identified as the peak of the athletics programme. The 26th and 27th carry a disproportionate share of the finals.
The timing sits awkwardly with the rest of the international calendar. The World Road Running Championships close in Copenhagen on 20 September, three days before the Nagoya programme opens, and the Berlin Marathon is on 27 September. Asian athletes with entries in more than one of those events have had to choose, and in most cases the continental championships have won, which is a reminder of how much weight the Asian Games still carry for federations across the region.
Competitively, the distance events are the ones to watch. Japan's men's marathon depth remains the best in Asia by a clear margin, Bahrain and Qatar bring naturalised talent across the middle distances, and India has spent the past three years steadily improving in the throws and the longer track events. The sprints are likely to be decided between Japan, China and the Gulf states, with the men's 4x100m relay a genuine contest rather than a formality.
For a championships that sometimes struggles for attention outside the region, the venue helps. Paloma Mizuho Stadium was rebuilt on the site of the old Mizuho Park Athletic Stadium and gives Nagoya a modern, permanent athletics facility rather than a temporary one. That legacy question, more than any individual medal, is what Japanese athletics will be measuring in a week's time.