Matt Denny questions Ultimate Championship events on World Athletics format’s debut
Posted Fri 11 Sep 2026 at 10:48amFri 11 Sep 2026 at 10:48amFri 11 Sep 2026 at 10:48am
World Athletics is set for its latest attempt at a slimmed-down, cashed-up event, with the so-called Ultimate Championship starting Saturday morning (AEST) in Budapest.
The event starts less than a week after the conclusion of the Diamond League season, with all the bells and whistles expected from a track and field meet trying to cut through on a global stage.
Winners will receive US$150,000 ($209,530) and even the eighth-placed athletes picking up a six-figure pay cheque as part of an overall US$10 million ($14 million) purse.
Held over three straight night sessions, the track at Hungary’s Gyula Zsivotzky National Athletics Centre will illuminate to highlight the event happening in that moment.
Rather than a lengthy program including qualifying runs, there will be just one final for many events and semis in the 100m, 200m, 400m and hurdles races.
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In a year without an Olympics or world championships, World Athletics president Sebastian Coe said the event will answer a simple but important question.
“Who’s the best?” he said.
“Nobody goes into the sport to figure out who’s second best, they go in wanting to know who the best is. And I think at the end of these championships we will have gone a long way to identifying that.”
To confirm that, there will be no podiums, only weighty prize purses and bragging rights between the 381 fierce competitors.
Most of the traditional track events will be contested (although 3,000m steeplechase, 10,000m and race walking are out) with only Olympic gold medallists, world champions and the current top-ranked athletes invited.
That includes Australian sprint stars Lachlan Kennedy in the 100m and Torrie Lewis in the 200m; Sarah Billings in the 800m; Abbey Caldwell, Jessica Hull and Cameron Myers in the 1,500m; and Ky Robinson, Rose Davies and Hull in the 5,000m.
Diamond League winner Eleanor Patterson and world champion Nicola Olyslagers will compete in the women’s high jump, while Commonwealth Games gold medallists Kurtis Marchall (pole vault) and Mackenzie Little (javelin) are also competing.
As part of the hype around the meet, World Athletics held a catwalk fashion event before a televised lane draft for the 200m, allowing athletes to choose which heat and lane they will run in.
The draft order was based on world rankings, with American Olympic champion Gabby Thomas picking first and placing herself in lane seven of the first semifinal heat.
World 100m and 200m champion Melissa Jefferson-Wooden, made the next selection and placed herself right inside her US teammate, kicking off the mind games early.
Lewis, choosing 10th, selected the outside lane in that first race and immediately going up against the best of the best.
“It is the confidence for me,” 2008 Olympic 100m hurdles gold medallist Dawn Harper-Nelson said as she hosted the event.
“This is what the lane draft is about.”
Coe said the innovations on display would show what the sport can be in the future, but that may sound some alarm bells for those athletes and disciplines without an invitation to Budapest.
The field program is very restrictive, with men’s and women’s events for high jump, javelin, long jump and pole vault, while only men’s hammer throw and women’s triple jump made the cut.
That left many on the outside looking in, including Australian discus star Matt Denny, who said the Ultimate Championship highlighted “a bigger issue in our sport”.
The payday and spotlight could be life changing for track and field athletes who travel the world to compete without many opportunities for the sort of prize money afforded to other sports stars.
“I support the concept of the Ultimate Championships,” Denny wrote on Instagram.
“Athletics needs innovation. We need to improve the broadcast product, attract new audiences and find better ways to grow the sport.
“But innovation should not come at the expense of opportunity.”
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The main argument for the disciplines that were included boiled down to a lack of audience interest in those that missed out, but Denny said that was an unfair metric when it is not athletes who make broadcasting decisions.
“When events are minimally shown on broadcasts for the last 20 years, you lose the reasoning to say people don’t want to watch,” he wrote.
“You cannot control what gets shown, what gets promoted, whose stories are told and which events receive the greatest exposure, then simply point to the result numbers as proof that people do not care about everything else.
“If an event is struggling for attention, before deciding the event is the problem, we should be asking whether we have genuinely given it the opportunity to succeed.”
The post received praise from fellow omitted athletes like Australian hammer throw national champion Steph Ratcliffe, race walker Rhydian Cowley and American shot put great Chase Jackson.
But even invited athletes like Dutch 400m star Lieke Klaver and European javelin champion Julian Weber backed Denny’s sentiments, with Weber praising the post as “so true”.