Tokyo has another bite at athletics cherry

Thursday 11 September 2025 7:00 am
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Wednesday 10 September 2025 2:52 pm

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The Tokyo 2020 Olympics was delayed and eventually played out to empty seats

If you’re an athletics fan, time to perfect your “work from home” excuses as the World Championships begin in Tokyo tomorrow. If you live west of Japan, that spells disrupted sleep patterns and unproductive days as medals are won in Tokyo nights.

These Championships are part reward for a local populace twice denied the chance to see elite track and field stars in the flesh: firstly, when the pandemic triggered the postponement of the 2020 Olympics, and then when the rearranged edition took place behind closed doors.

They also follow London’s model of hosting the Worlds a few years after the Games, with the twin aims of justifying stadium expenditure and cementing local affection for the sport generated by the Olympics.

World Athletics (or the IAAF, as it was then) last took its flagship event to Japan in 2007, when Osaka was the host. This happened to be my first experience of a major championships in a formal capacity.

New in post as chair of UK Athletics, I was surprised to witness a sparsely attended competition in a city – Japan’s third largest – that barely seemed aware of its existence. There was little evidence of event branding on billboards and street lamps, and certainly no razzmatazz in the Nagai Stadium.

Comparing Osaka with Tokyo shows how far track and field has come over the past 18 years, but also how little has changed.

Then the sport had no global stars to speak of. Its format was tired, as was the way it was presented – both in-venue and on TV screens around the world. The IAAF was led by a president later shown to be corrupt, that revelation subsequently helping to explain decisions that baffled at the time. The Balco doping scandal hung like a cloud over the sport.

In between times, Usain Bolt has been and gone (2008 and 2017 bookending his global medal tally), World Athletics has a president in Seb Coe who has majored on ensuring integrity in the sport (albeit doping remains a scourge), and the appliance of science has jazzed up the stadium experience for spectators.

A few minor tweaks aside, however, the basic World Championships format is largely unchanged, for better or worse. Heritage is nurtured but long sessions with longueurs test the patience of broadcasters anxious to lock in their audiences for hours.

At the time of writing, Tokyo’s ticketing site showed only one sold-out session. Unsurprisingly, that’s this Sunday evening which showcases both the men’s and women’s 100m finals. I’ve seen VIPs squabbling over seats at previous men’s 100m nights, the race acquiring iconic status equivalent to a heavyweight title fight, with ticket demand to match.

There are plenty of tickets available for the rest of the championships, though, placing the onus on organisers to drive local appetite off the back of opening weekend excitement. That worked for Berlin in 2009, helped by Bolt stardust, and aside from the curiosity that was Doha in 2019, crowds for the Worlds since have generally swelled to fill venues for evening sessions.

The Japan National Stadium has a 68,000 capacity. Japanese kids are back at school for the autumn term. Tokyo’s two pro baseball teams face each other on a pair of evenings next week, competing for attention. No easy marketing task, then.

For a marathon-loving nation, perhaps Sunday’s women’s 42km race will light the blue touch paper of excitement, setting the event up for the week to come. That and Saturday morning’s race walks.

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Japan’s medal prospects are slim. In Osaka, it won a solitary bronze in the women’s marathon. In the subsequent eight World Championships it has secured just 17 medals, nine of them in race walking, two in marathons.

Stadium success has been scarce. Japan does, though, have the reigning world champion and top ranked women’s javelin thrower, Haruka Kitaguchi – although her season’s best places her only sixth in the world. Wisely, the organisers have scheduled her final for next Saturday night.

Fortunately, too, Paris 2024 showcased a broad range of characters in the sport who are now shouldering the box office burden that for a decade felt like it was being borne by one Jamaican sprinter alone. Mondo Duplantis in the pole vault aside, it’s fair to say that no medal feels preordained for any athlete going into these championships.

Great Britain bagged 10 medals at both the 2023 Worlds in Budapest and the Paris Olympics, right at the top of the historic charts. Insiders committed to particular segments of the sport will moan about disciplines that are underrepresented on this GB team, but ‘twas ever thus. In my time, the throws and middle distance communities complained. Now, middle distance is arguably the nation’s greatest strength.

The reality is that only the USA is able to demonstrate strength across the sport, and even then each individual medal is far from guaranteed. Going into Tokyo, Britain’s best medal prospects are those who succeeded in Paris, plus Molly Caudery in the pole vault.

Anything close to 10 medals would likely see the GB team finish as the most successful from Europe and in the top few nations overall.

Golds, though, have proven hard for GB to land – only Keely Hodgkinson in Paris; Josh Kerr and Katarina Johnson-Thompson in Budapest. This just demonstrates once again the fiercely competitive nature of this truly universal sport, and the fine margins between first and the rest.

As an outsider these days simply looking in, I’m ready to WFH and call the medals home.

Picture this

Photographer Mark Shearman was a fixture at athletics meetings around the world in my time at UK Athletics. And not just major events.

I still have an image that surprisingly popped up in my inbox – Mark has spied me slogging away among the masses at the Brighton Marathon and his finger was as quick on the shutter button as ever.

In advance of Tokyo 2025, The Times this week collated 20 of Mark’s greatest images spanning his six decades chronicling athletics. Scroll through them and I guarantee you’ll be surprised that one photographer produced so many of the iconic photos that are seared into your sporting memory.

You can find the article about Mark Shearman’s career and the images here.

Ed Warner is chair of GB Wheelchair Rugby and writes his sport column at sportinc.substack.com

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