Athletics-Nervous excitement as Sydney Marathon closes on major status

By Nick Mulvenney

SYDNEY (Reuters) - If all goes well when the biggest marathon field ever gathered in Australia races 42 kilometres around the streets of Sydney on Sunday, World Marathon Majors will soon add a seventh race to the elite series.

The Sydney Marathon will become the first race since Tokyo in 2013 to join long-established majors in New York, London, Boston, Berlin and Chicago if it passes the WMM assessment criteria for the second straight year.

"We're really excited for Sunday to arrive," race director Wayne Larden told a news conference in Sydney on Thursday.

"We're prepared, we're ready. All of our plans look good on paper, I feel we're ticking all the boxes. So we've just got to go out there now and deliver the event as per the plans and I'm sure we'll meet the meet the criteria."

Larden has been race director since 2005 when there were 2,300 finishers and has overseen the growth to the 25,000 runners who will test themselves over a newly re-jigged course on Sunday.

"It's taken me 18 years to build it to 5,000 and two years to get it to 25,000," Larden told Reuters.

"So the trajectory has been very steep in the last two years since we became a candidate race, because there's a lot of excitement about the world majors being in Sydney."

The size of the field and a new start location -- back at North Sydney Oval where the Olympic marathon got underway in 2000 -- will make the task a bit harder for Larden and his team, but he is optimistic they will deliver.

"I'm feeling confident, but it's a big event and anything can happen. But I think we're well prepared for it," he said.

"I will pretty well know on race day how we've gone, based on our plans and how we've delivered them."

'ICONIC CITY'

The World Marathon Majors series started in 2006 and the candidacy programme was introduced in 2017 with the idea of bringing the total number of races to a maximum of nine.

"It's World Marathon Majors, and the word 'world' is in there, and we are not really worldwide, right?" WMM chief executive Dawna Stone told Reuters outside the city's world renowned Opera House.

"We were looking around the world and saying, 'Where are we not and where maybe should we be to bring more access to individuals that want to take place in a major'."

Stone's assessment team will be on the ground in Sydney on Sunday and a decision on whether the race gets the nod is expected in October.

"What better place to be than iconic city like this that everybody wants to go to?" Stone added.

"If everything goes according to plan, I am hopeful that they will become the next major."

A decent elite field is clearly one of the WMM criteria and 2022 world champion Gotytom Gebreslase will run in the women's race on Sunday with fellow Ethiopian Leul Gebresilase, bronze medallist at last year's worlds, competing in the men's.

Some of the loudest cheers from the crowd might come for defending women's wheelchair champion Madison de Rozario, who won silver in the Paris Paralympics marathon last Sunday and only arrived back home in Australia on Wednesday.

"I love the marathon, it's my favourite event," de Rozario said.

"Doing two in a week is pretty brutal, but a lot of us love it so I'm glad to be here."

(Reporting by Nick Mulvenney, editing by Peter Rutherford)