The mass-participation city marathon

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The marathon spent its first seventy years as a small championship event contested by a few dozen men. The mass-participation form — tens of thousands of entrants, a closed city, charity fundraising, a lottery ballot, a finisher medal — was invented in New York in the 1970s and copied deliberately. Chris Brasher ran New York in 1979, described it in The Observer as the greatest folk festival the world has seen, and built London around that model two years later; London accepted 7,747 of about 20,000 applicants for its first race in 1981 and 6,255 finished. The form now organises the training year of millions of people, and the fastest runners are a small minority of the field it exists to move. Its scale is still growing: the 2026 London Marathon reported 59,830 finishers, described as the largest number recorded at a marathon.

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