The TCS London Marathon is considering a significant change to its elite women’s race in 2027, with organisers open to including male runners and pacemakers in an attempt to help athletes chase the women’s world record. Chief executive Hugh Brasher told The Independent that “all things are on the table”, adding that the event regularly talks to athletes about their goals and has “played around with it” in the past.
The idea would reverse a long-standing convention. For nearly two decades the major marathons have kept their elite women’s fields separate, with female-only pacemakers, so that times can be ratified as women-only records. Brasher pointed to Paula Radcliffe’s 2:15:25 in London in 2003, when male runners ran alongside her, as a precedent for the approach. That performance was originally treated as a mixed-race mark, and World Athletics has since drawn a firmer line between women-only and mixed-race records.
The competitive logic is straightforward. Male pacemakers provide a steadier rhythm and a draft that female-only groups often cannot match over the closing stages, which is why mixed races tend to produce faster times. The point has been underlined by record-setting runs from Tigst Assefa, whose 2:11:53 in Berlin remains the best-known example of a mixed-race world record, and organisers appear keen not to leave London behind in the pursuit of fast women’s times.
Any change would arrive in an already unusual year for the event. The 2027 London Marathon will be staged over two days, with the elite men racing on Saturday 24 April and the elite women on Sunday 25 April, and roughly 100,000 runners spread across both days. The women’s race will therefore have its own stage, and Championship-category women will line up behind the elite field for the first time in London.
No specific format has been set out. Organisers are consulting elite athletes and are expected to announce the final structure of the elite field in January. The central question is whether a mixed race that produces faster times is worth the loss of a women-only record, and the answer will depend heavily on what the leading women, their coaches and their managers say during that consultation.