2025 Athletics World Championships

The 20th World Championships in Athletics will be held in the Japanese capital Tokyo from 13 to 21 September 2025. It will be the third time the World Championships have been held in Japan, with the 3rd Championships also being held in Tokyo in 1991, and Osaka hosting the 11th Championships in 2007. Tokyo has also hosted the Summer Olympics twice, in 1964 and 2021.

The World Championships in Athletics are organised by World Athletics, the international governing body for athletics. At the organisation's meeting in July 2022, Tokyo was selected to host the 2025 World Championships in competition with Nairobi, Kenya, Chorzow, Poland and Singapore [1].

The Championships will feature 49 events, equally divided between women's and men's events, as well as a single mixed event. This is completely similar to the program of the previous championships in Budapest in 2023. The Japanese hosts expect that over 2000 athletes from more than 200 countries will participate in the championships in Tokyo [2].

The next world championships will be held in Beijing in 2027.

Host city and stadium

Tokyo is Japan's largest city and has around 15 million inhabitants, depending on which suburbs are included. Tokyo is located on the island of Honshu, and the city is the powerhouse of a Greater Tokyo area with over 41 million inhabitants. The Tokyo area is thus one of the world's largest contiguous urban areas.

The world championships will be held at the Japan National Stadium. It is a sports arena with great traditions, and the stadium has been demolished, rebuilt and modernized several times on the same site in line with the needs of the times.

The National Stadium was most recently rebuilt and expanded ahead of the Olympic and Paralympic Games in 2020. Due to the Covid-19 pandemic, the Games were postponed to 2021, where they were held without spectators. The World Athletics Championships will be the first major sporting event to utilize the capacity of the new stadium. The National Stadium will have a capacity of 68,000 spectators for the championships [3].

World Athletics

On July 17, 1912, the International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF) was formed in Stockholm, shortly after the closing ceremony of the 5th Olympic Games, which took place in the Swedish capital. In June 2019, the organization decided to change its name to World Athletics. Since its establishment, the IAAF has been responsible for the organization of virtually all forms of international athletics worldwide. The number of nations and territories affiliated with the organization has increased from 17 when it was founded in 1912 to over 200 now [4].

Athletics is a popular sport with great traditions, and athletics was already an important part of the Olympic Games in Greece in ancient times, from the first known games in 776 BC. Athletics also had a prominent position at the first Olympic Games in modern times in 1896 in Athens. In 1896, the competitions were only for men, but from 1928 Olympic athletics was also opened to women.

At its congress in 1913, the IAAF decided that the results of the Olympic Games should also be considered world championships. For many years, the winners of the athletics events at the Olympic Games were also recognised as world champions. However, in 1976 the IAAF decided to organise the first official world championships completely separate from the Olympic Games.

The first official world championships in athletics were held in 1983 in the Finnish capital Helsinki. Up until 1991, the championships were held every four years, but since 1991, the world championships have been held every other year in odd-numbered years.