Marathon News - Cal International To Host 2022 USATF Marathon Championships

Jun-17-2022

Cal International To Host 2022 USATF Marathon Championships
by David Monti
(c) Race Results Weekly, all rights reserved

(17-Jun) -- Organizers of the California International Marathon announced this morning that they will be hosting the 2022 USA Track & Field (USATF) Marathon Championships on Sunday, December 4. The event previously hosted those championships in 2017 and 2018 on their fast, point-to-point course from Folsom Lake to Downtown Sacramento.

"We are honored to have been chosen to host the 2022 USATF Marathon Championships," said Sacramento Running Association executive director Scott Abbott through a media release. "Serving as the USATF Marathon Championships for the third time in the last four conducted national marathon championships further cements CIM as the top performance marathon in the United States. This is in accordance with the Sacramento Running Association's mission to bring championship running events to our community to feature running as a major part of the local sporting landscape."

A $90,000 prize money purse will be on offer, Abbott said, with $20,000 going to the race winners. The winners can also earn a $3,000 course record bonus (sub-2:10:27 for men and sub-2:26:53 for women). In addition to the rest of the prize money for the top-10 men and women, athletes can also earn $500 bonuses for qualifying for the 2024 USA Olympic Team Trials Marathon (2:18:00 or better for men and 2:37:00 or better for women).

At the last two versions of these championships Tim Ritchie (2:11:55) and Sara Hall (2:28:10) won the national titles in 2017, and Brogan Austin (2:12:38) and Emma Bates (2:28:19) won in 2018. Bates --who was unsponsored at the time and was running her debut marathon-- will be running the 2022 World Athletics Championships marathon next month.

"We are proud that CIM has been long-recognized as a place for top and emerging American marathoners to perform at the highest levels in order to launch, elevate, or capstone their professional marathon careers," Abbott continued. "With another designation as the USATF Marathon Championships, CIM '22 projects to be a cornerstone event for American marathoners on the road to Paris 2024."

The World Athletics and USATF-certified course is gently downhill, losing 93 meters from start to finish (2.21 meters per kilometer). That's well within the 3.25 meters per kilometer elevation loss limit set by USATF for Olympic Trials qualifying. For the 2020 Olympic Trials Cal International delivered more qualifiers than any other race. In the 2018 edition of the race, 98 women ran better than the "B" standard of 2:45:00. Of course, the new 2:37:00 standard is much tougher.

The USATF Marathon Championships are part of the USATF Running Circuit.