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Hong Kong Marathon: boost for city as showpiece athletics event gets go-ahead marking return of elite sport
- The annual race returns on Sunday, October 24 with a slimmed-down field of 18,500 participants across the three categories
- The last time the event was held, in 2019, 74,000 runners took part
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Hong Kong sport received a timely boost on Wednesday evening when this year’s embattled edition of the Standard Chartered Hong Kong Marathon was finally given approval to go ahead after months of high-level talks.
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The Marathon, which was cancelled outright in 2020 due to the spread of coronavirus, will be held on Sunday, October 24, with a vastly reduced field of 18,500 runners across all three race categories, and with strict Covid-19 regulations in place. 74,000 runners took part in the last edition in 2019.
More than half of the runner quota for the three contests – marathon, half-marathon and 10-kilometre – have already been reserved for runners who successfully enrolled in last year’s cancelled race.
The annual blue-riband event will be the city’s first large-scale public participation sporting event since the emergence of the Covid-19 pandemic.
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Marathon organiser, the Hong Kong Association of Athletics Affiliates (HKAAA), revealed last Thursday that it was hopeful negotiations at an emergency meeting with government officials had made sufficient progress to stage the race, but could still not confirm the event on.
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