Wings for Life World Run organisers confirmed on Friday morning that registrations for Sunday's global event have crossed the 2.1 million mark across 165 countries, the largest combined entry list in the race's 13-year history. The simultaneous global start will go off at 1pm coordinated universal time on Sunday 10 May, which translates to a 2pm start in central Europe, 9am on the United States east coast and 11pm in Sydney. As ever, the catcher car format means that no runner will know precisely how far they have to go until the moving finish line passes them.
The flagship live events anchor the day. Vienna's Schonbrunn Palace start has been sold out for several weeks and will see Olympic snowboard gold medallist Anna Gasser drive the lead catcher car, which sets off 30 minutes after the gun at 14 kilometres per hour and accelerates progressively until the last competitor is overtaken. Other flagship cities include Munich, Cape Town, Sao Paulo, Dubai, Zadar and Lake Tahoe, and the global broadcast feed will switch between locations through the afternoon. Most of the flagships are sold out or close to capacity in line with last year's record-setting field.
App run participation, which allows runners to take part from anywhere with a virtual catcher car, accounts for the bulk of the entry list and is on track to set a new record. Organisers have introduced a refreshed version of the official app for 2026, with improved offline tracking, audio cues at every kilometre and a redesigned post-run summary screen that reflects how far the runner travelled before the catcher car passed them. Group app runs have been organised in more than 500 locations worldwide, including a notable cluster of running club takeovers in the United Kingdom and Ireland tied to local park and canal venues.
On the elite side, the women's race looks set to be among the deepest in the event's history. Three-time defending champion Dominika Stelmach of Poland returns alongside Kenyan marathon Olympian Edith Chelimo, while the men's flagship in Vienna will see Kenya's Geoffrey Kusuro and Norway's Sondre Nordstad Moen go head to head. Course records in Wings for Life are unusual because the moving finish line means every edition is run on a fundamentally different distance, but the pace of the front group through the first 30 minutes typically sets the tone for the global ranking that emerges by mid-afternoon.
Every registration fee and every donation collected by the event goes directly to the Wings for Life Foundation, which funds research into spinal cord injury. Since the race's inception in 2014, the event has raised more than 35 million euros and brought roughly one million runners to the start line in cumulative terms. Sunday's edition is shaping up to be the most lucrative single-day fundraising event in the foundation's history, and the event team has indicated that they expect the 13th edition to push the all-time donation total past 40 million euros.