The 2026 World Mountain Running Association World Cup opened with a double-header at Beijing Changping over the weekend, the first time the WMRA's premier circuit has staged two consecutive scoring races at the same venue. Saturday's uphill-only race climbed 700 metres along a 7.6km Great Wall section to a finish above the Mutianyu watchtowers, while Sunday's classic up-and-down race ran a 13.1km loop through the Silver Pagoda Forest below. Strong winds at altitude on Saturday gave way to bright sunshine on Sunday, and a 600-strong field assembled from 22 federations split the four races between Switzerland, Italy, Kenya and Japan.
Switzerland's Maude Mathys, the 2024 World Mountain Running champion and a four-time European champion, kept her unbeaten 2026 record intact with a controlled 26 minutes 13 seconds win in the women's Saturday uphill, gapping Kenya's Joyce Njeru by 38 seconds and Italy's Elisa Compagnoni by 71 seconds. The men's uphill went to Italian Isacco Costa in 22:31, with Kenya's Paul Machoka second in 22:59 and Italy's Alex Baldaccini, the veteran of Mont-Blanc Marathon fame, third in 23:24. Costa's win, his first at WMRA World Cup level, followed a top-five finish in March at Sierre-Zinal Spring in Anniviers and consolidates his place at the top of the European mountain running rankings.
Sunday's classic offered a different test, and a different result. Michael Selelo Saoli of Kenya, the 19-year-old who won the under-20 World Cross silver in Tallahassee three months ago, broke Costa just before the high point of the second loop and pulled away to win in 1 hour 25 minutes 49 seconds. Costa, paying the cost of the Saturday effort, hung on for second in 1:28:00 with Machoka completing a Kenyan-Italian podium in 1:28:58. Mathys made it a Saturday-Sunday double in the women's classic, edging Njeru by under 30 seconds in 1:34:20, with Compagnoni again third. The result extends Mathys's career WMRA podium count to 38 across all distances and disciplines.
The choice of Changping reflects a wider shift in mountain running's calendar. Beijing's World Athletics Championships in September 2027 will include trail running for the first time in the senior programme, and the Changping organising committee is expected to bid for the trail course. World Athletics president Sebastian Coe, who flew on to Botswana for the World Relays after attending the Sunday classic, used a brief press appearance to praise the local volunteer effort and confirm that mountain running's integration into the World Athletics calendar will be reviewed at the council meeting in Monaco in November. WMRA president Jonathan Wyatt added that 2027 World Cup races would extend to nine venues, up from seven this year.
For the British federation the weekend ended without a podium but with one notable performance: Anna Lupton, third at the European Mountain Running Championships in 2025, finished fifth in the Sunday classic and confirmed her selection for the European Off-Road Championships in Annecy in June. The next round of the World Cup is the Grossglockner Berglauf in Austria on 9 May, where Mathys is set to skip her ninth career race in the Tirol and Costa will defend his 2025 victory. The full Beijing Changping results are available on the WMRA website, and Olympic Channel's archive coverage of both races opens on Friday.