What to know for track and field's new Ultimate Championship

The inaugural World Athletics Ultimate Championship opens tomorrow in Budapest, where many of track and field's brightest stars — including several Canadians — will vie for big cash prizes over three days of competition.

Here's a quick primer.

What it is

The Ultimate Championship was created by World Athletics (track and field's global governing body) to bring together the sport's best athletes for a made-for-TV international meet in a year that does not include an outdoor world championships. The worlds are held every two years, with the next one taking place in September 2027 in Tokyo, setting the stage for the 2028 Olympics in Los Angeles.

The plan is to hold the next Ultimate Championship shortly after L.A., giving track and field a chance to build on the momentum it always generates (and then usually loses) every Olympics.

To attract the top athletes to Budapest, World Athletics put an eye-catching $10 million US in prize money up for grabs, including $150,000 for the winner of each individual event. That's quite a bump from last week's Diamond League Final, where the winners pocketed either $30,000 or $60,000, depending on the profile of their event. At the 2024 Olympics, World Athletics awarded gold medallists a $50,000 bonus. At last year's world championships, they got $70K.

How it works

There are 26 individual events on the program — 13 men's, 13 women's — plus a pair of relays: the mixed 4x100m and the mixed 4x400m. Several events that are part of the Olympics and world championships were dropped in order to fit the Ultimate Championship into a TV-friendlier three-day window with just a single three-hour session each day.

For the solo events that made the cut, all reigning Olympic, world and Diamond League