The 2026 Laureus World Sports Awards return to the Spanish capital on Monday evening, with Madrid's Palacio de Cibeles hosting a ceremony that has, unusually, produced one of the most athletics-dominated shortlists in the awards' history. Four track-and-field names appear across the two headline categories — Mondo Duplantis in the men's award and Faith Kipyegon, Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone and Melissa Jefferson-Wooden in the women's — and in a season bracketed by the World Indoor Championships in Toruń and a fast-opening outdoor track campaign, the Laureus nominations are the latest evidence of athletics' unusually strong run of global crossover moments over the past twelve months.
Duplantis arrives as defending Laureus Sportsman of the Year after a 2025 season that saw him set four world records across indoor and outdoor campaigns, a run that has continued into 2026 with his fifteenth career world record of 6.31 metres earlier this spring. His place on the shortlist alongside tennis's Carlos Alcaraz and Jannik Sinner has prompted some to suggest he is the clear favourite in a field that is otherwise split between individual and team-sport icons; Laureus voting is conducted by a panel of former champions and sports journalists and is always difficult to predict, but Duplantis is the only athlete on the men's list to have broken a world record in both 2024 and 2025.
The women's list is arguably even more interesting for athletics fans. Kipyegon receives her third consecutive nomination after a 2025 season that included a fourth world 1500m title in Tokyo, a world 5,000m silver and the continued development of her Nike-supported sub-four-minute mile ambition. McLaughlin-Levrone is nominated after her World Championships 400m title, a performance that included a championship record and a second gold on the 4x400m relay. Jefferson-Wooden made history in Tokyo as only the second woman ever to complete a triple sprint crown — 100m, 200m and 4x100m — at a single World Championships, and her nomination reflects the impact of that achievement on the sprinting landscape.
Beyond the headline prizes, Para athletics is represented by Swiss wheelchair sensation Catherine Debrunner, who raced to multiple titles in Tokyo and returns to Boston as the marathon's wheelchair favourite on Monday morning, and Ecuador's Kiara Briggite Rodríguez España. Debrunner's inclusion in the Sportsperson with a Disability shortlist has been welcomed in particular by the road-racing community, where her recent marathon wheelchair world best has helped push the discipline's profile further into mainstream sports coverage. Elsewhere, Para athletics and road running feature in the Comeback and Breakthrough categories, with several athletes from cross-country and ultrarunning featured in Laureus Sport for Good programmes announced alongside the awards.
The ceremony will be streamed globally from Madrid on Monday evening local time, with red-carpet coverage from late afternoon. For running fans, the timing is pointed: just hours after the 130th Boston Marathon finishes on Boylston Street, Laureus will hand out the highest cross-sport honours the world of athletics has, and Kipyegon, McLaughlin-Levrone, Jefferson-Wooden and Duplantis will all be watching to see which of them adds a Laureus to the championship medals and world records they have collected over the past two seasons. Either way, athletics will leave Madrid reassured that its 2025 season produced the kind of moments that still register outside the narrow world of track and field.