Nairobi wins the 2029 World Athletics Championships, Africa’s first senior edition

Nairobi will host the 2029 World Athletics Championships, the first time the senior global meet has been awarded to an African city. The World Athletics Council made the decision in Budapest on Tuesday after a two-day meeting. London and Rome lost the 2029 vote. Munich was given the 2031 championships.

The 22nd edition is due at Kasarani Stadium in September 2029. The bowl is listed at about 48,000 seats and is being rebuilt ahead of the Africa Cup of Nations in 2027. Nairobi has already run the World Under-18 Championships in 2017 and the World Under-20 Championships in 2021. Mombasa held the World Cross Country Championships in 2007. Kenya bid for 2025 and lost to Tokyo. The 2029 file was the second attempt.

Sebastian Coe, the president of World Athletics, called the bid compelling and emotional. He said Kenya is one of the great athletics nations and that the sport is woven into the country. He also said history alone was not enough. The championships should come to Africa, he argued, when the host, the bid and the circumstances were right. Nairobi, in his words, had shown that this was its moment.

The medal record is the other half of the case. Kenya has 72 world championship golds and 38 Olympic golds, almost all of them in middle- and long-distance running. It is the second-most successful nation in championships history. At the 2025 Worlds in Tokyo it finished second on the table with seven golds and 11 medals in all. Faith Kipyegon, who holds five world titles and three Olympic golds, is the face most often used to explain why the meet should be held where those runners train.

Four cities were in the last round. Coe said the quality of all four files showed the strength of the championships. Munich’s 2031 award keeps a European heavyweight on the calendar two years after Nairobi. London and Rome will have to wait for a later cycle. For African federations the larger fact is the precedent. Junior meets have already come to the continent. The senior championships had not.

Staging a ten-day championship in Nairobi will test hotels, transport and the rebuilt stadium two years after AFCON. World Athletics will send technical delegates. The Kenyan government will have to show that the financial guarantees in the bid survive a three-year wait. If those pieces hold, September 2029 will be the first time the world’s best sprinters and the continent’s distance runners share a senior championship on African soil. That is the sentence Coe was willing to put on the result.