2025 World Championship qualifying standards are faster than for Paris 2024

World Athletics has just revealed the qualifying standards for the indoor and outdoor World Athletics Championships in 2025, and some are considerably faster than the standards for the Paris 2024 Olympics. As with recent global championships, the qualification process will involve a combination of entry standards and world rankings.

The goal of these changes is to allow half of the athletes to qualify via qualifying time standard and the remainder by world rankings; organizers want to avoid a situation where more athletes achieve qualifying times than can be accommodated. The majority of athletes at Paris 2024 qualified for their event by entry standard. In the men’s marathon, 70 of 74 athletes met the time requirement for guaranteed entry. For the women’s marathon, Paris had to adjust the total number of entries (initially 80) to accommodate the 88 women who met the qualifying standard.

 

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Six of the men’s events will see more difficult times to guarantee entry at the global competition. The most notable jump is in the marathon, with the qualifying time having been lowered by almost two minutes, from 2:08:10 to 2:06:30. The 5,000m standard has been sped up by four seconds.

The women see increased difficulty over nine events, with the marathon standard quickening by more than three minutes, jumping from 2:26:50 to 2:23:30. The 1,500m event now requires athletes to run a full second faster than needed to qualify for Paris, while the 10,000m athletes will need to speed up by 20 seconds.

For the 2025 World Championships, to be held in Tokyo next September, World Athletics looks to encourage participation at global meetings throughout the qualifying window by making more athletes reliant on the IAAF points system to boost them in the world rankings.

Men’s qualifying standards

Women’s qualifying standards