London Boroughs

Sport 2 min read

The London Marathon will be run twice, on consecutive days, once only

Two pale blue paper ribbons of identical shape laid side by side on a deep navy ground, one small red marker at the end of each

One million, three hundred and thirty thousand people entered the ballot for the 2026 London Marathon. Rather fewer than fifty thousand ran it. The organisers have decided to do something about the arithmetic.

The Double

The 2027 TCS London Marathon will be run on Saturday 24 and Sunday 25 April — two days, 100,000 participants between them, on the same Greenwich-to-Westminster route both days.

It is explicitly one year only. Chief executive Hugh Brasher calls it the event's most ambitious evolution to date and a once-in-a-generation, one-time-only reimagining.

What it is meant to achieve

Beyond clearing some of the ballot backlog, the organisers are aiming at what they describe as the largest fundraising moment in UK sport, with projected fundraising above £150 million.

How the ballot works now

Everyone who has already applied goes into a ballot for both Saturday and Sunday, with results announced by random draw in early July. Nobody may run in person on both days, though it is possible to run one day and complete the virtual TCS London Marathon MyWay as well.

The rest of the week

The Double closes a full week of events: an extended Running Show, the TCS London Marathon & Friday Night Lights 5K, and the TCS Mini London Marathon on Friday 23 April, with more than 20,000 young runners.

For anyone who lives on the route rather than running it, the phrase to note is "the same iconic route". Two days means two closures of the same roads, and the boroughs that carry the course through the middle stretch — Greenwich, Lewisham, Tower Hamlets, Southwark — will be shut for a weekend rather than a Sunday. Businesses along the Isle of Dogs and Rotherhithe stretches feel this most, because those are the sections where the diversion is longest. The one consolation is that the closure pattern is already well understood; what changes is its duration, not its shape. Spectating is the other side of that coin: the same vantage points will be half as crowded on any given day.

Source: London Marathon Events checked against the source

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