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World Athletics’ inaugural Ultimate Championship begins in Budapest on Friday, bringing together Olympic champions, world champions, Diamond League winners and other elite performers for a three-day competition designed to determine the sport’s “best of the best” across 28 disciplines.
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The new championship boasts a record $10 million prize fund, with each event winner set to receive $150,000, more than twice the winner’s prize at last year’s World Championships, while runners-up will take home $75,000 apiece.
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World Athletics has introduced an unusually compact format, with 28 finals compressed across three evening sessions, while some traditional events, including the 10,000m and discus, have been left out entirely in an attempt to make the sport faster and more attractive to television viewers.
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The event is also being used as a testing ground for a range of innovations, including athlete red carpets, a 200m lane-draft system, augmented-reality graphics, a black infield designed to draw focus to the action, and entertainment elements aimed at attracting younger audiences.
September 11, (THEWILL) – Track and field is entering unfamiliar territory this weekend as World Athletics launches its new Ultimate Championship, a three-day event in Budapest designed to bring the sport’s biggest stars together in a high-stakes battle for a record prize pot.
The inaugural competition begins on Friday, September 11, and runs until Sunday, September 13, with the National Athletics Centre hosting a field packed with Olympic champions, world champions, Diamond League winners and some of the sport’s leading performers.
At the centre of the experiment is an eye-catching figure: $10 million. That is the largest prize fund ever offered at a single track and field event, with individual champions earning $150,000 and runners-up receiving $75,000. But money is only part of World Athletics’ ambition.
The organisation wants the Ultimate Championship to become more than another major competition, positioning it instead as a laboratory for changing how athletics is staged, presented and consumed.
A championship built around the best of the best
The Ultimate Championship was created to address one of athletics’ long-standing challenges: maintaining the sport’s momentum during seasons without an Olympic Games or World Championships.
World Athletics president Sebastian Coe has described the competition as an opportunity to experiment with a different model and identify the athlete who can genuinely claim to be the best in their discipline.
The 2026 season provided an obvious opportunity for such an experiment, with no Olympic Games or World Championships taking place. Instead of allowing the season to fade after the traditional Diamond League finale, World Athletics has created another global showcase. The inaugural event features 381 athletes from 65 federations, according to the organisation’s final entry list, with 28 disciplines scheduled across three evenings.
Why the format is different
One of the most striking features of the Ultimate Championship is its compressed schedule. Rather than following the traditional championship structure of heats, semi-finals and finals spread across a longer period, the event is designed around three-hour evening sessions packed with decisive action.
There will be 28 finals, while the 800m and shorter track events will feature semi-finals before their finals. The men’s and women’s 1500m and 5,000m events, meanwhile, go straight to finals. The idea is straightforward: reduce downtime and give spectators and television viewers a greater concentration of moments that matter.
World Athletics has also made difficult decisions about which events to include.
Long-distance disciplines such as the 10,000m and 3,000m steeplechase are absent, as are events including the shot put and discus. The organisation says those decisions were influenced by popularity and viewer-behaviour data.
Athletics gets a makeover
The competition is not simply changing what happens on the track. World Athletics has also attempted to redesign the atmosphere surrounding the event. Athletes will arrive on a red carpet, while a dedicated media day will feature press conferences and photoshoots. The 200m will introduce a lane-draft system in which athletes choose their preferred semi-final heat and lane according to the rankings.
There will also be no traditional medals. Instead, Ultimate champions will receive trophies, while television coverage will feature augmented reality, athlete headshots, win probabilities and projected finishing positions. Even the stadium’s appearance has been altered, with a black infield designed to draw attention towards the active competition areas. Pole-vault star Mondo Duplantis is also contributing to the entertainment side of the event, while American sprinter Noah Lyles, who is unavailable because of injury, is serving as host.
Josh Kerr and Ingebrigtsen headline the sporting battle
For all the experimentation surrounding the championship, the competition will ultimately be judged by what happens when the world’s best athletes face each other.
One of the most anticipated contests comes in the men’s 1500m, where Britain’s Josh Kerr will renew his rivalry with Norway’s Jakob Ingebrigtsen.
Kerr enters the competition after a remarkable season that has included Commonwealth Games success and a world record in the mile. He also holds the 2026 world-leading 1500m time of 3:27.62.
Ingebrigtsen, meanwhile, arrives as the reigning Olympic champion over 5,000m and recently returned from injury to win European gold in the event. Their meeting is particularly significant because Kerr defeated Ingebrigtsen to win the 1500m world title in Budapest three years ago.
Now, they return to the same city with another global title at stake.
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Not everyone is convinced
Despite the excitement surrounding the new competition, the Ultimate Championship has already attracted criticism. Some athletes have questioned whether athletics really needs another major championship in an increasingly crowded calendar.
Norwegian hurdler Karsten Warholm has described the 2026 schedule as “chaos” and warned that having multiple championships could create confusion for fans.
There have also been complaints about disciplines being excluded. World triple-jump champion Pedro Pichardo publicly questioned the decision to leave his event out, while world shot-put champion Chase Jackson criticised the exclusion of field events. That tension captures the challenge facing World Athletics.
The organisation wants to make the sport easier to follow and more commercially attractive, but any attempt to simplify athletics inevitably means deciding which events receive the spotlight, and which are left outside it.
A test for the future of athletics
The Ultimate Championship is therefore about more than the $10 million on offer in Budapest. World Athletics has openly acknowledged that the format is an experiment. Coe has said there is no guarantee everything will work and suggested the competition could look different when it returns in two years.
That makes the inaugural edition particularly important. If the three-night format succeeds, elements of it could influence future World Championships and potentially change how athletics presents itself to television audiences. If it fails to capture attention, World Athletics will have valuable evidence about what needs to change.
For now, Budapest represents the beginning of that experiment. With $10 million at stake, some of the biggest names in athletics competing and a radically different presentation designed to capture a new generation of fans, the Ultimate Championship is attempting to answer a much bigger question than who wins each event: can athletics reinvent its biggest moments before the audience moves on?
Olumide Atiba is a sports journalist with THEWILL, known for his keen news sense and compelling storytelling. He has built a reputation for turning leads into clear, well-structured reports that resonate with readers, with a strong focus on football coverage
