Eliud Kipchoge has confirmed the Porto Alegre Marathon on 12 July as the second stop on his seven-continent world tour, completing the South American leg of a tour that opens at the Sanlam Cape Town Marathon on 24 May and closes in Antarctica at the back end of 2027. The Kenyan double Olympic marathon champion announced the Porto Alegre fixture in a short video posted to his social channels on Friday morning, in a clip filmed at his training camp in Kaptagat that also showed Cape Town race director Janet Welham handing him his Cape Town race-day kit.
Brazil holds particular meaning for Kipchoge. It was the venue, at the Rio 2016 Olympics, of his first Olympic marathon gold, a victory secured on a sweltering Sambodromo finishing straight that he has described in interviews as one of the moments that defined the rest of his career. Returning to Brazilian roads a decade later, in the 2026 calendar year, was something his management team had been working on since the back half of last year, and the Porto Alegre date is the result of a partnership with the city's tourism authority and the Rio Grande do Sul state running federation, both of which have framed the race as a once-in-a-generation marketing moment for the south of the country.
Porto Alegre is not yet a major international marathon by the standards of the World Marathon Majors, but its 26th edition this year will run on a flat, fast course along the Guaiba waterfront and is expected to draw a field of around 12,000 runners across the marathon and accompanying half. Race organisers said on Friday that they were preparing for a significant uplift in international entries on the back of Friday's announcement, and that the elite-seeded waves had already been expanded by 60 per cent for the 12 July race day. Kipchoge will run the full marathon, not a guest appearance over a shorter distance.
The world tour, in Kipchoge's framing, is less a series of races than a single multi-year project. The full schedule, as announced in late January, takes in Cape Town in May, Porto Alegre in July, the Melbourne Marathon on 11 October as the Oceania stop, and three further marathons across Asia, North America and Europe in 2027 before a closing leg at Wolf's Fang in Antarctica. He will, on his own framing, complete a marathon on every inhabited continent and one beyond, and he has said publicly that the tour is the structure he intends to use to bridge from full elite competition into a longer-running ambassadorial role.
Kipchoge said on Friday that he would not race competitively between the Porto Alegre marathon and Melbourne, with the gap allowing him a seven-week reset block at altitude in Iten and a tailored 10-week build for Melbourne. The Cape Town race remains his immediate priority, with race-day fitness work continuing in Kaptagat under coach Patrick Sang, and the tour's broader narrative arc — spanning two calendar years and seven continents — will continue to anchor his public-facing schedule for the remainder of 2026 and through 2027.