World Athletics has formally signed off on the mixed-team mile and 5km that will run alongside the half marathon at the World Athletics Road Running Championships in Copenhagen on 19 and 20 September. The new format, first floated by the Local Organising Committee at the December Council meeting in Monaco, will see each participating nation enter two men and two women per discipline, with team rankings decided on combined placing points rather than aggregate times. Gold, silver and bronze team medals will be awarded, although no prize money will be paid for the team standings.
The decision lifts a small piece of uncertainty for federations that have spent the spring deciding whether to align their domestic road-mile and 5km calendars with a championship-style team selection. Coaching staff at British Athletics and USATF had both flagged the format as a "watch this space" question through April, and a handful of European federations had been holding off on naming their national 5km champions, which sit on the Copenhagen qualifying pathway, until the team format was nailed down. Wednesday's confirmation gives those federations a clean four-month run-in to selection.
The competition format draws explicitly from the World Athletics Cross Country Championships team scoring used since 1973: each runner's finishing position is converted to placing points, the lowest four counting per nation. That neutralises the pacing dynamic at the very front of the field — a single runner cannot drag a national time down on their own — and gives mid-pack athletes within a strong national squad a much larger share of the result. World Athletics Council member Pierce O'Callaghan, briefing reporters on Wednesday, said the format had been deliberately chosen so that "the depth nations bring beyond their two best athletes finally counts in a road context."
The mile and 5km on the Copenhagen course are expected to share the same closed loop along Frederiksholms Kanal that the half marathon will use the next morning, with the men's and women's individual races run back to back on the Saturday afternoon. Sebastian Coe described the new format on Tuesday as "the missing competitive piece" alongside the half marathon individual titles, framing it as the natural counterpart to the long-form individual race that has anchored the championships since 2023. The combined two-day broadcast window has been extended by 35 minutes to accommodate the team medal ceremonies.
For runners themselves, the implications are immediate. National 5km road champions in Britain, Ireland, Spain and the United States now know that finishing inside their country's top two on a Copenhagen-eligible course this summer is the cleanest path on to the team. The Loughborough International on 17 May, which doubles as the UK Athletics 10,000m Championships, is the first British selection event under the new pathway, and the Boston 5K series leaderboard is expected to play a similar role in the United States selection conversation. The next entries window for federations closes on 31 July, with full team announcements expected through August.