Melissa Jefferson-Wooden and Letsile Tebogo have been named Ultimate Stars and will also serve as captains for the Kids’ Athletics Ultimate Challenge at the first edition of the World Athletics Ultimate Championship, which will take place in Budapest from 11 to 13 September 2026. The announcement from World Athletics comes with 150 days to go until the start of the new championship and links two of its leading sprinters to a pre-event activation at the Zsivotzky Gyula National Athletics Centre, where young people from the Hungarian capital will take part the day before competition begins.

The appointment also helps further shape the public profile of a tournament through which World Athletics wants to open a new window in the international calendar. The federation has conceived it as a biennial season finale, reserved for a reduced elite field and designed to bring together Olympic champions, world champions, Wanda Diamond League winners and the year’s best athletes on the same stage. “The Ultimate Championship will be where the world’s top-ranked track and field athletes compete head-to-head to decide who is truly the best on the planet,” said Sebastian Coe, president of World Athletics, during the countdown event in Tokyo.

What the World Athletics Ultimate Championship is

The first edition of the Ultimate Championship will bring together close to 400 athletes from around 70 countries across 28 events, with a programme compressed into three evening sessions, each lasting under three hours. There will be 26 individual events, split between 16 track disciplines and 10 field disciplines, plus two mixed relays: the 4×100 and the 4×400. On the track, the 100m, 200m, 400m, 800m, 100m hurdles, 110m hurdles and 400m hurdles will begin directly with eight-athlete semifinals, from which four finalists per race will advance; the 1500m, 5000m and relays will be contested as straight finals.

There will be no preliminary qualification rounds in the field either. All jumping and throwing events will be straight finals, and the horizontal jumps and throws will use an 8-8-6-4 format: all eight athletes will be guaranteed two attempts, the top six will move on to a third round, and the top four will receive one final attempt. There will be no country quotas or national selection panels, meaning qualification will depend on performance and competitive ranking built up over the season. “With only the best of the best on show and cutting straight to semi finals and finals, we will create an immediate pressure to perform for athletes aiming to claim the title of the ultimate champion,” Coe said when presenting the format.

A season finale designed for global audiences and greater visibility

The championship will also launch with a total prize pot of $10 million, the largest in athletics history for a single event, with $150,000 for each champion. World Athletics has stated that all participating athletes will receive financial compensation and that they will also benefit from expanded promotional rights to activate their image commercially. Jon Ridgeon, the governing body’s chief executive, said the proposal is not limited to prize distribution, but aims to build a product with greater television reach and stronger global audience potential: “There will be a strong focus on television audiences, with an aim to reach the biggest global audience possible.”

The federation sees this tournament as a complement to the major annual championship it wants athletics to have every season, especially in years without the Olympic Games or an outdoor World Championships. In that regard, Coe defended the logic of the project in Budapest in particularly direct terms: “We have created the Ultimate to ensure every athletics season culminates with a major global championship, one with real meaning for the athletes, fans, media and broadcasters.” That strategy also includes a more visible construction of individual athlete profiles. Usain Bolt has been presented as Ultimate Legend, Mondo Duplantis as an Ultimate Star and composer of the event anthem, while Jefferson-Wooden and Tebogo now add a dimension linked to Kids’ Athletics and youth engagement.

Budapest, the stadium and the differences from the World Championships and the Diamond League

The selection of Budapest as the inaugural host city was finalised after a competitive process involving several major cities and builds on the precedent of the World Athletics Championships Budapest 23, which the federation itself considers one of the most successful championships in its history. The competition will be staged at the National Athletics Centre, also referred to in some event materials as the Zsivotzky Gyula National Athletics Centre, the stadium built for the 2023 World Championships and since turned into the country’s flagship athletics venue. Balázs Furjes, Hungary’s member of the International Olympic Committee -IOC- and co-chair of the local organising committee, linked the new tournament to that recent track record by saying that Budapest is ready to welcome the world’s elite back “to the new National Athletics Centre.”

In format terms, the Ultimate Championship is not equivalent to the World Athletics Championships, which remain athletics’ traditional global championship: broader, longer, with wider national representation and the classic logic of a worldwide tournament contested by countries. Nor does it replicate the structure of the Wanda Diamond League, which in 2026 will keep its 14-meeting circuit plus the final and will continue to function as a staged league in which athletes accumulate points across the season to qualify for the last event. The Ultimate Championship is intended to occupy a different space: a closed three-day final featuring Olympic champions, world champions, Diamond League winners and the season’s top-ranked athletes in order to decide, on a single stage, who takes the title of champion of champions. Within that model, World Athletics has also sought to introduce a narrative more closely tied to the visibility of athletics stars away from competition. “The Ultimate is all about elevating the profile of our sport and its heroes, both on the track and off,” Coe said when announcing the role of Jefferson-Wooden and Tebogo.