Wicked star Cynthia Erivo crossed The Mall in 3 hours 21 minutes 40 seconds on Sunday, more than a minute under the average male UK marathon finishing time and well clear of any of her previous marathon attempts. Erivo timed the closing mile so deliberately that the start of "Defying Gravity" — her own showstopper from the Wicked soundtrack — was queued by her finish-line crew to land as she came down the blue line. The crowd at the Buckingham Palace pinch point obliged with a singalong, and the moment travelled further on social media in the days afterwards than any of the elite winning images from the same race.
Erivo's 3:21:40 was a fourteen-minute improvement on her 2022 London debut and almost 35 minutes faster than her 2024 New York City Marathon. The actress, who has spoken openly about training in the dark before Wicked: For Good shoots, ran a controlled 1:38 first half and negative split the back end on the embankment with what looked like substantial fitness in reserve. London Marathon Events confirmed afterwards that her time would have placed her inside the top 10 percent of the women's field had she been racing in the regular ballot wave rather than the celebrity start group.
Behind Erivo, the celebrity field reflected London's newly muscular pull on the entertainment world. Strictly winner Tilly Ramsay finished in a personal best, broadcaster Adele Roberts ran her seventh post-cancer marathon, and Made in Chelsea's Sam Thompson recorded a four-minute improvement on his 2024 mark. The novelty entries also held their own, with a fully costumed Daddy Pig finishing comfortably inside five hours and Olympic gymnast Beth Tweddle running her first marathon in 4:48 after a week of nervously posting about her hip flexors on Instagram.
The 2026 edition was always going to bring the cameras out — a sub-two-hour men's winner and a women's-only world record will do that — and London Marathon Events leaned in. Celebrity wave starts were trimmed by 15 minutes to better integrate with the mass field, and Guinness World Records officials confirmed 38 successful records within the celebrity and general entry groups, including Archie Hunt's 2:27:41 fastest marathon dressed as a book character. The race's Guinness-certified 59,830 finishers also broke the world record for the largest number of finishers at a single marathon.
For the celebrities, what tends to land hardest the day after the race is the legitimacy of the times rather than the costumes. Erivo's 3:21 sits in the same conversation as Romesh Ranganathan's 2024 mark and Edith Bowman's 2025 sub-four; that conversation is increasingly indistinguishable from the conversation around any sub-elite ballot runner. Marathon culture has changed, and the celebrity story arc — once dominated by gentle ridicule and finish-line tears — is now built squarely on PB-chasing and split discipline. London 2026 made that more obvious than any edition before it.