With the 2025 World Athletics Championships in Tokyo simply 4 months away, Athletics Canada unveiled the primary wave of athletes set to signify Workforce Canada in Japan. On Tuesday, eight athletes had been formally named to the world championship roster, led by Canadian marathon document holders Cam Levins and Natasha Wodak.
The marathon qualification window for Tokyo 2025 closed on Could 4, finalizing Canada’s full marathon squad of six. Headlining the boys’s workforce is Levins, who has discovered nice success in Japan, together with his North American marathon document of two:05:36 on the 2023 Tokyo Marathon, the place he completed fifth.
The boys’s marathon workforce
Becoming a member of Levins on the boys’s workforce is 2024 Canadian marathon champion Justin Kent, and his coaching companion Ben Preisner. Kent and Preisner prepare collectively in Vancouver below coach Richard Lee and beforehand represented Canada within the marathon on the 2023 World Athletics Championships in Budapest, inserting twenty eighth and thirtieth, respectively.
Athletics Canada had a troublesome alternative for the Canadian marathon workforce in Tokyo, with six males inside the World Athletics choice quota after the Could 4 deadline. Calgary’s Rory Linkletter had the very best rating spot (fiftieth), however he turned down a workforce spot to shift his focus to a possible fall marathon main. “It was a alternative I made with my coach and agent,” says Linkletter. “4 years (in a row) of competing at international championships is rather a lot, and it’s a good turnaround from the spring I’ve had.”
Linkletter is coming off a sixth-place end on the 2025 Boston Marathon, the place he clocked the second-fastest marathon time in Canadian historical past (2:07:02). The 28-year-old can be slated to run the Ottawa Marathon on Could 25. Former Canadian marathon champion Thomas Broatch and a couple of:10 marathoner Tristan Woodfine had been the 2 different runners within the choice quota not chosen for the workforce.
The ladies’s marathon workforce
On the ladies’s aspect, the choice course of was extra simple, as solely three athletes had been inside quota. Wodak returns for her second consecutive World Championships, coming off a Fifteenth-place end in Budapest—the highest Canadian outcome from the occasion.
She’ll be joined by Malindi Elmore, who locked in her spot with a 2:26:05 on the 2024 Valencia Marathon, and Leslie Sexton, who rounds out the ladies’s workforce. Sexton, from Vancouver, hasn’t raced a marathon since ending seventh on the TCS Toronto Waterfront Marathon final fall, however she has had earlier success at worlds with a Thirteenth-place end on the 2022 World Athletics Championships in Eugene, Ore.
Past the marathon workforce, race walker Evan Dunfee and 10,000m standout Moh Ahmed had been additionally named to the roster. Dunfee, the present world document holder within the males’s 35 km race stroll, can be trying to bounce again after narrowly lacking the rostrum in each the 20 km and 35 km occasions in Budapest. Earlier this 12 months, Dunfee set a world document (within the 35km distance) in Dudince, Slovakia.
Extra workforce members within the 10,000m and 35 km race stroll occasions should be added when Athletics Canada pronounces the rest of the Tokyo 2025 workforce on Aug. 28.
