Fukuoka International Marathon 2022 will take place on Sunday, 4 December in Japan and you can follow the race live online as the 2022 World Athletics Elite Label Road Race schedule continues. Click here for the complete elite field for this year’s race.
Sunday’s race will be the 76th edition of the Fukuoka International Marathon and the final one after the event organizing committee decided to end participation at one of the longest-running races in Japan for good after this weekend. The race will be streamed in Japan live on TV Asahi.
The Fukuoka International Open Marathon Championships started out as an elite-only men’s marathon in 1947 before welcoming its first foreign winner in the mid-1950s. The popular event then grew into a major marathon en route to build a very good reputation globally.
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However, the Japanese Association of Athletic Federations, which was the organizer of the event, revealed last March (2021) that the Fukuoka International Marathon 2022 would be the final in the series before the event is discontinued because of the loss of sponsors and the high cost of producing the television broadcast, as reported by the Association of International Marathons and Distance Races.
Will we see the course record of 2:05:18, set by Tsegaye Kebede of Ethiopia in 2009 go down on Sunday? I do hope so!
Abel Kirui of Kenya owns the quickest time entering this race with a personal best of 2:05:05, set in Valencia in 2020, but his teammates Kenneth Keter (2:06:05, Amsterdam 2021), Silas Too (2:06:32, Eindhoven 2021) and Israel’s Maru Teferi (2:06:58, Seville 2022) could also get close to the mark this weekend.
The winning time last year was 2:07:51with the first eight runners running faster than 2:10, while five personal bests were set by athletes in the Top 10.
Let’s see how things will go this year.
