The 2026 TCS London Marathon has lost another of its biggest names. Peres Jepchirchir, the reigning world marathon champion and 2024 London champion, has withdrawn from next Sunday's race after confirming she is still recovering from a stress fracture first sustained during her Valencia Marathon build last December. The announcement, made through her management and confirmed by London Marathon Events this week, marks the second successive year the Kenyan has missed the race, and it deepens what had already become one of the more disrupted women's build-ups of the spring.
Jepchirchir's team said the 32-year-old was diagnosed with a stress fracture after Valencia and was unable to resume running until late January. That late start left her with less than three months of structured marathon preparation before race day, and in recent weeks the decision to step back from London was taken on medical advice rather than after a specific training setback. "It is simply not enough time to do London justice," Jepchirchir said in a statement. "I have huge respect for this race and for the athletes lining up there, and I am not willing to start if I cannot compete properly." The withdrawal follows last week's news that Olympic champion Sifan Hassan had also pulled out, citing an Achilles issue that has kept her on a treadmill for much of March.
The timing compounds the disruption. Jepchirchir has missed both of the last two London Marathons — she sat out the 2025 race with an ankle injury after winning the 2024 edition in a women's-only world record of 2:16:16, a time that stood as the absolute women's-only benchmark until Tigst Assefa surpassed it in 2025. Her 2024 win is still considered one of the most tactically controlled performances of the modern London era, and her presence was expected to deepen the defending champion's rivalry with Hassan. Without either, the narrative shifts away from the trio that produced so many of the marathon's headline moments of the past two seasons.
London Marathon Events has not announced any late additions, and with the elite entries now effectively locked for this year, the women's field will line up with a reshaped set of protagonists. Assefa returns as defending champion on the strength of a 2:15:50 course-record run in 2025, and she will be joined by 2025 NYC Marathon winner Hellen Obiri, making her London debut, and by 2:14:00 performer Joyciline Jepkosgei, the 2023 champion who returns in pursuit of a second title. Amane Beriso, Olympic bronze medallist Megertu Alemu, and Britain's Eilish McColgan and Rose Harvey round out a field that is still among the strongest of any marathon this year even after the twin losses.
For Jepchirchir, the withdrawal is less a crisis than a recalibration. Her team has indicated that her medium-term target remains the autumn majors, with Chicago or New York both under consideration depending on how the stress fracture site responds in the coming weeks. At 32 she remains well inside the prime marathon age range for East African women, and her record over the past four years — Olympic gold in Sapporo, London and New York titles, the 2025 world championship in Tokyo — suggests a competitor who does not need a London start to remain central to the marathon conversation. What the withdrawal does confirm, however, is how razor-thin the margin for error has become for athletes racing at this level on the ever-shortening recovery calendar between majors.