London Marathon

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Founded by the athletes Chris Brasher and John Disley and first run on 29 March 1981, from Greenwich in the south-east across the Thames at Tower Bridge, out through the Isle of Dogs and back along the Embankment to a finish on The Mall. The first race drew about 20,000 applications, accepted 7,747, and ended in a deliberate dead heat between Dick Beardsley and Inge Simonsen on Constitution Hill, with 6,255 finishers. The course is flat, near sea level and heavily attended, and is one of the fastest in the world; it is also the race that most explicitly built the charity-fundraising and ballot model that mass marathons now use everywhere. On 26 April 2026 it became the first course on which a marathon was run under two hours in a record-eligible race, when Sabastian Sawe won in 1:59:30, and Tigst Assefa set a women-only world record of 2:15:41 on the same day.