Verified across World Athletics, ESPN, AP and AFP. Here’s the article.
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Athletics enters uncharted territory on Friday night when the inaugural World Athletics Ultimate Championship opens at the National Athletics Centre in Budapest, with a record $10m (£7.4m) prize pot — the richest in the sport’s history — to be shared among 381 athletes from 65 federations across three evenings of competition.
Each of the 28 winners crowned between 11-13 September will collect $150,000, more than double the $70,000 paid to gold medallists at last year’s World Championships in Tokyo. Runners-up take $75,000, third place $40,000, and — in a break from every championship that has preceded it — nobody goes home empty-handed, with even the last-placed finisher in each final banking $2,000.
Mondo Duplantis, the Olympic and world pole vault champion and holder of the 6.31m world record, headlines an entry list that also includes Olympic champions Gabby Thomas, Marileidy Paulino, Keely Hodgkinson, Yaroslava Mahuchikh, Letsile Tebogo and Ethan Katzberg, alongside world champions Melissa Jefferson-Wooden, Oblique Seville and Collen Kebinatshipi.
The richest three nights track has ever staged
The financial architecture is the point. World Athletics president Sebastian Coe, who absorbed considerable criticism for introducing prize money to Olympic athletics in Paris in 2024, has gone further here.
“We have a $10m prize pot where every athlete who competes goes home with something,” Coe said in Budapest. “I am unapologetic and we are unwavering in athletics about our support for the athletes.”
Usain Bolt, retired nine years and serving as an event ambassador, put the sums in blunter perspective. “I mean, jeez, we missed out on this cash prize,” the eight-time Olympic champion said. “I won a few championships and it still does not add up to all the cash. It’s work. Yes, you’re competing for your country, but you’re putting your body on the line.”
There are no medals in Budapest. Winners receive trophies instead — a deliberate signal that this is something other than a World Championships, even as organisers insist the competitive standard will match one.
Twenty-eight finals, and five events left out
The format has been stripped down for television. Each session runs roughly three hours in the evening, with 26 individual disciplines — 13 for men, 13 for women — plus the mixed 4x100m and mixed 4x400m relays.
The structural changes are significant:
- No heats in the sprints. Athletes go straight into semi-finals, with only the top four advancing to each final.
- Straight finals in the field events, the 1500m and the 5000m.
- A compressed 8-8-6-4 field-event format: eight competitors get two attempts, the top six a third, the top four a final attempt.
- No national quotas, so a single country may enter as many qualified athletes per event as it has.
Entry came via Olympic titles from Paris 2024, world titles from Tokyo 2025, 2026 Diamond League Final victories, world rankings and a handful of exceptional invitations.
The trimming has cost five disciplines their place: the 3,000m steeplechase, 10,000m, shot put, discus and triple jump are all absent. Those omissions have drawn the sharpest criticism of the week. “How do you have track and field and just skip events?” asked world shot put champion Chase Jackson. “How does that make any sense?” Triple jumper Pedro Pichardo was blunter still: “This isn’t track and field and it’s not good for our sport.”
Karsten Warholm, meanwhile, has questioned whether the condensed schedule is legible to viewers at all, calling it “chaos” and adding: “I don’t think even athletics people are keeping up.”
A made-for-TV experiment in an empty year
The Ultimate Championship exists because 2026 has neither an Olympic Games nor an outdoor World Championships. Coe’s ambition is to abolish the notion of an off-year entirely by staging this event biennially in the even-numbered gaps.
The presentation reflects that. A red-carpet arrivals event on Thursday drew hundreds of photographers as athletes appeared in gowns and suits — a Hollywood-styled prologue no track meeting has previously attempted. Mahuchikh, the Olympic high jump champion, called it “a different atmosphere for track. It looks like something special.” Noah Lyles, ruled out by injury, will work the three nights as emcee rather than compete.
Budapest is a fitting venue: the National Athletics Centre, capacity around 14,000, hosted the 2023 World Championships and remains one of the sport’s better-appointed modern stadiums.
What is actually at stake
Coe has been careful not to oversell. “We’ve created a stage that I really genuinely think that our best athletes will respond to,” he said. “There are no few bragging rights involved in this.” He has also conceded there is “no guarantee we’re going to get everything right.”
That candour matters, because the Ultimate Championship is a test of a proposition athletics has circled for two decades: whether the sport can hold a mainstream audience outside an Olympic fortnight. Golf, tennis and cricket have all answered that question by building lucrative, shortened, broadcast-shaped formats. Track and field, until now, has not.
Britain sends 22 athletes, among them Hodgkinson in the 800m, Josh Kerr, Jake Wightman and Georgia Hunter Bell over 1500m, Matthew Hudson-Smith in the 400m and Amy Hunt across both sprints. All three nights are live on the BBC.
If Budapest delivers close finals and a coherent story across nine hours of television, World Athletics will have created something genuinely new. If it does not, the governing body will have spent $10m proving that money alone cannot manufacture jeopardy. Either way, the answer arrives by Sunday night.
Ahmad Ali is Sports Editor at SportsPortal.net
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**Word count:** 812 (body prose, within the 700–900 target).
Two notes on the copy: the `` byline is the only tag outside your permitted list — drop that line if your CMS is strict. And I’ve used “Femke Broeders-Bol” in no place, but should you want her in the 800m field alongside Hodgkinson, World Athletics and AP both render her that way.
Sources: [World Athletics final entry lists](https://worldathletics.org/competitions/world-athletics-ultimate-championship/2026/news/press-releases/final-entry-lists-world-athletics-ultimate-championship-budapest-26), [ESPN preview](https://www.espn.com/athletics/story/_/id/49794332/world-athletics-ultimate-championship-how-watch-uk-tv-channel-schedule-team-gb-athletes), [AP via Local10](https://www.local10.com/sports/2026/09/10/red-carpet-and-10m-in-prize-money-at-stake-make-track-look-different-ahead-of-ultimate-championship/), [AFP/France24 — Coe](https://www.france24.com/en/live-news/20260910-bragging-rights-up-for-grabs-at-game-changing-ultimate-championship-says-coe), [AFP/France24 — Bolt](https://www.france24.com/en/live-news/20260910-ultimate-championship-as-big-as-olympics-and-more-lucrative-says-bolt), [BBC via Yahoo Sports](https://sports.yahoo.com/articles/10m-line-inaugural-ultimate-championship-064522479.html).
Sports journalist and editor at SportsPortal.net. Covers cricket, football, Formula 1, tennis, and basketball with a focus on how global sports connect with Pakistani audiences. Follows the PSL, Pakistan national cricket team, Premier League, and major international tournaments. Has reported on sports for digital audiences since 2021.
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