The Rimi Riga Marathon will close its biggest-ever entry list of 40,000 runners on Sunday 17 May with a men's marathon field led by Eritrea's Nguse Amlosom and Kenya's Wisley Kimeli, two sub-2:09 marathoners who have not raced each other since the 2024 Frankfurt Marathon. Race director Aigars Nords confirmed during Monday's press conference that Amlosom (2:08:23, 2021) and Kimeli (2:08:33, 2024) will be supported by a pacing crew built around a 64:30 first-half target, with a back-end pull on a relatively flat city course measured to the IAAF Bronze Label standard.
The pre-race storyline belongs to Latvia. Jelena Prokopcuka, the country's most decorated long-distance runner, will run the 42km course one final time as an elite athlete. The 50-year-old, who still holds the Latvian marathon record at 2:22:56 from 2005, has chosen Riga over a planned farewell run in New York City this autumn, citing the home crowd and the chance to share start-line space with the younger generation of Latvian marathoners she has mentored. Prokopcuka will be granted an elite bib and a separate pace group set to a 3:00 finish.
The women's elite race is open. Ethiopia's Ayantu Kumela (2:24:29, 2022) takes top billing on personal best but has not raced a major marathon since the 2024 Berlin Marathon. Kenya's Esther Macharia and Bahrain's Eunice Chumba both arrive on the back of strong spring half-marathons and are likely to test Kumela inside the closing 10km, where the course re-enters the medieval old town and gains a small but tactically significant set of cobbled rises along Valdēmāra iela.
The half-marathon, run on the same morning and previewed separately, supplies the high-profile elite headlines: Gabriel Geay (59:18) and James Kipkogei (59:31) are racing each other for the first time since the 2024 Houston Half Marathon. With Charles Mbatha Matata, Aklilu Gebremariam Asfaw and Robert Kiprop Koech also ready to break the hour, the men's half is set up as the fastest race ever staged in the Baltics. Domenika Mayer, the German marathon record-holder, defends her 2025 Riga half-marathon title in the women's race.
Conditions on Sunday are forecast to be near-perfect: 11°C at gun, light cloud cover and a 5km/h southerly wind that should favour the second half of the marathon. The Rimi Riga Marathon has invested heavily in elite recruitment over the past three editions, and a deep men's marathon paired with sub-60 half-marathon traffic will give the event the most credible front-end resume it has yet produced. The race forms part of the AbbottWMM Wanda Age Group qualifying network for 2027.