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World Athletics announced record-breaking participation in the 2024 Continental Tour, with over 20,000 athletes from 200 countries competing across the meetings, achieving a ton of records.
World Athletics has announced that the Continental Tour featured the highest numbers in history in 2024, attracting more than 20,000 athletes from about 200 countries competing across the series of about 270 meetings.
The tour has four levels, Gold, Silver, Bronze and Challenger, and in 2024 World Athletics included meetings in all six continental areas. This witnessed one world record, 12 area records and 205 national records.
The historic feats were achieved between January and September, with two more Challenger meetings in Japan and Paraguay coming up this and next month (October and November). Athletes got a chance to test themselves over their respective distances with their impressive performances in the Continental Tour.
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The Gold tier, which featured 11 meetings, started in Melbourne in February and ended in Zagreb in September.
World Athletics announced that the 2024 series was capped by the world discus record of 74.35m set by Lithuania’s Mykolas Alekna at the Oklahoma Throws Series World Invitational, a Continental Tour Bronze meeting.
Olympic 400m hurdles bronze medallist Femke Bol also managed to improve her own European record to 50.95 at the Resisprint La Chaux-de-Fonds, to become just the second woman in history to break 51 seconds for the discipline behind Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone.
As if that was not enough, Canada’s Ethan Katzberg, opened his season with a North American record at the Continental Tour Gold meeting in Nairobi with world 800m champion Marco Arop setting an area 1000m record of 2:13.13 in Zagreb.
Commenting on the impressive statistics, World Athletics CEO Jon Ridgeon said: “I’m delighted that the Continental Tour continues to deliver against its four key goals: to provide a clearly understood global competition system which provides more prize money to athletes and encourages them to compete more regularly; to encourage meeting organisers to increase the quality and prize money of their meetings; to motivate new meetings to be established; and to grow the sport in new markets around the world.”
He added that alongside all the key goals he mentioned, the Continental Tour Gold meetings are always broadcast live in more than 140 territories around the world as well as on the Inside Track platform on World Athletics. It was also noted that the full 2025 Continental Tour calendar will be announced in the coming weeks.
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