STADIUM TO THE STARS: THE HISTORY OF THE LOS ANGELES MARATHON
It was March 9, 1986. Los Angeles was still riding the wave of something that had happened two years earlier: the 1984 Summer Olympics, a financial and cultural success that had left the city with a question it did not quite know how to answer. How do you keep the energy going? How do you hold onto that feeling?
For a businessman named Bill Burke and the organizers at L.A. Marathon Inc., the answer was simple. You put on a race.
That first Los Angeles Marathon drew 10,747 registered runners to Exposition Park, making it the largest inaugural marathon in United States history at the time. The city showed up. Spectators lined streets that most Angelenos rarely stood on by choice. And two runners crossed the finish line at the Memorial Coliseum, the same venue where the Olympic marathon had ended two years before, to claim the first championships of a race that is still running 40 years later.
This is the story of how a post-Olympic idea became one of the defining events on the American running calendar.
The Olympic Spark
To understand the Los Angeles Marathon, you have to understand what the 1984 Games did to this city.
Los Angeles had hosted the Olympics once before, in 1932, but the 1984 edition was different. It came at the height of the American running boom. Jogging had gone from a niche activity to a national obsession. Frank Shorter's gold medal in the 1972 Olympic marathon had lit a fuse. Bill Rodgers and Grete Waitz had made road racing feel accessible to ordinary people. New York's marathon was exploding. Chicago had launched in 1977. Boston was already a century old.
And then Joan Benoit Samuelson ran into the Memorial Coliseum in the first-ever Olympic women's marathon and the crowd lost its mind. A woman from Maine, hair in a white painter's cap, waving to the crowd as she pulled away from the field. It was one of the defining images of those Games.
L.A. had felt all of that energy up close. The marathon was born from it.
The Early Years: Coliseum to Downtown
The first champions of the Los Angeles Marathon were Mark Coogan, who won the men's race in 2:13:55, and Nancy Ditz, who claimed the women's title in 2:36:27. Both went on to have respected careers in the sport, and their victories established from the start that L.A. was a place where serious runners came to compete.
The early race ran a point-to-point course starting at Exposition Park and finishing at the Memorial Coliseum, leaning hard into the Olympic connection. It was a statement of intent. This was not a fun run. This was a race with history built into it from day one.
The field grew steadily through the late 1980s and into the 1990s. By then the race had become a fixture on the spring marathon calendar, running each year in March. Legacy Runners, those who have finished every edition since 1986, began accumulating years. The race still honors them today, giving each one a permanent bib number. In 2024, 95 Legacy Runners crossed the line completing their 1,000th mile of L.A. Marathon racing, a milestone that speaks to what this event means to the people who have grown up with it.
In 1996, the course was redesigned around a downtown loop, starting and finishing near the central library. The city was changing, and the marathon was trying to reflect it.
The Lornah Kiplagat Incident
Every old race has a story that does not show up in the record books. Los Angeles has one from 1997 that nobody who was watching will forget.
A Kenyan runner named Nadezhda Ilyina crossed the finish line first in the women's race. She was declared the winner. And then officials reviewed the course footage and found that Ilyina had cut through a service station, shaving distance off the course. She was disqualified.
The victory went to Lornah Kiplagat, a Kenyan runner who had not been a professional marathoner for long. In fact, 1997 in Los Angeles was her first marathon. She had entered the race as a friend and training partner of Ilyina's, and she finished it as the champion under circumstances neither of them could have anticipated. Kiplagat would go on to have a remarkable career at the road distances, including three World Half Marathon Championship titles. But Los Angeles was where it started, and it started in the strangest of ways.
Frank McCourt and the Stadium to the Sea
The Los Angeles Marathon spent the early 2000s under the ownership of Divine Racing, which modified the course and shifted things around without ever quite finding a configuration that felt permanent. Participation was inconsistent. The race needed a reinvention.
It got one in 2008, when Frank McCourt, then owner of the Los Angeles Dodgers, purchased the operating rights and made a decision that changed the character of the event entirely.
The new course would start at Dodger Stadium in Chavez Ravine and end at the Santa Monica Pier, 26.2 miles to the west. Point-to-point. Almost entirely downhill in net elevation. A true tour of the city.
Runners would leave the stadium, drop through downtown past the Walt Disney Concert Hall, wind through Echo Park and Chinatown, climb toward Hollywood and the shadow of the Hollywood sign on Sunset Boulevard, push through West Hollywood, run the length of Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills, and then descend into Century City before hitting the final miles in Brentwood and Santa Monica with a glimpse of the Pacific Ocean.
It was called Stadium to the Sea, and it was exactly the kind of course Los Angeles had been waiting to build. The city finally had a marathon route that matched its personality.
The response was immediate. In 2009, the race's 25th anniversary, drew over 26,000 registrants, the largest field in the event's history to that point. A race that had been searching for itself for a decade suddenly knew exactly what it was.
The Course Evolution Continues
The Stadium to the Sea route served the race well for years, but the finish line in Santa Monica eventually became a logistical and financial problem. The city of Santa Monica quoted dramatically increased costs for hosting the finish, and around 2020 the endpoint was moved to Century City, at the intersection of Santa Monica Boulevard and Avenue of the Stars, giving the course its current name: Stadium to the Stars.
The character of the race did not change. It still begins at Dodger Stadium. It still passes through Hollywood and Beverly Hills. The neighborhoods are still the show. But the finish line is now inland, in the gleaming commercial center of the west side rather than on the sand.
Some runners miss the ocean. Most will tell you the experience is still unlike anywhere else they have run.
The Men Who Have Won Here
For much of the 2000s and 2010s, winning the Los Angeles Marathon was a Kenyan affair. Kenyan men won the race 21 times between 1999 and the early 2020s, with the occasional Ethiopian breaking through. The dominance was so complete that an American victory started to feel like a historical artifact, something that had happened in a different era of the sport.
The last American man to win in Los Angeles before 2025 was Paul Pilkington in 1994. Pilkington's victory was itself a piece of folklore: he had entered the race as a pacer, not a contender, and when he looked around at the halfway mark and realized nobody was challenging him, he decided to keep pushing. He won in 2:12:13.
Then 31 years passed.
On March 16, 2025, in just his second career marathon, a 25-year-old from Elburn, Illinois named Matt Richtman broke away from the field at the halfway mark and ran away from everyone. He crossed the line at Century City in 2:07:56, the second-fastest time in the marathon's history on its current route. He won by nearly three minutes. A year later, the 2026 edition produced the closest finish in LA Marathon history, decided by 0.01 seconds. He had been a standout cross-country runner at Montana State but was largely unknown on the marathon circuit. His debut at Twin Cities the previous fall had been solid but not historic. Nobody expected what happened in Los Angeles.
The course record itself belongs to Ethiopia's Markos Geneti, who ran 2:06:35 in 2011, still the benchmark after more than a decade.
The Women's Race
The women's history at Los Angeles has its own arcs, its own moments.
Nancy Ditz won that first edition in 1986, establishing that the race took the women's field seriously from the start. The 1990s brought competitive East African runners increasingly into the picture, and the pattern that emerged on the men's side, dominant Kenyan and Ethiopian winners, repeated itself in the women's race over time.
The women's course record is held by Ethiopia's Askale Merachi, who ran 2:24:11 in 2019. It remains one of the fastest times ever recorded on the current Stadium to the Stars course.
The race has featured a unique format at various points in its history called the Marathon Chase, which puts the men's and women's elite fields on the same course simultaneously, with the women given a head start calculated from their respective personal bests. The idea is that the fastest male and female finisher cross the line around the same time, creating a unified race rather than two separate events running parallel. It ran from 2004 to 2014, was discontinued for several years, and was revived in 2022. Women won seven of the 11 chase editions before the first discontinuation.
Students Run LA
No part of the Los Angeles Marathon's story matters more than what has happened in East Los Angeles.
In 1987, a teacher named Harry Shabazian at Boyle Heights High School enrolled six students in a marathon training program. They trained together. They ran together. They finished the 1990 race alongside a small group of teachers who had joined the program from schools across the city.
That was the beginning of Students Run LA.
By 1993, the program had grown enough to spin off from the Los Angeles Unified School District as an independent nonprofit. Today, more than 3,200 middle and high school students from 185 school and community programs train alongside 550 volunteer leaders. The program costs students nothing. Entry fees, transportation, training gear, and shoes are all provided free of charge. Students build toward the marathon through a structured sequence of shorter races across the six months before the event.
And on race day, thousands of them line up at Dodger Stadium alongside everyone else. Many of them will say it is the hardest thing they have ever done. Most of them will say it changed something about how they see themselves.
Every year about 99 percent of SRLA students who reach the start line cross the finish line. That number, more than any course record or elite winner, tells you what the Los Angeles Marathon actually is.
The 1992 Postponement
Los Angeles marathons do not exist outside of the city they run through. In April 1992, a jury acquitted four police officers in the beating of Rodney King, and Los Angeles erupted. The city burned. The National Guard was deployed. Dozens of people died and thousands of businesses were destroyed.
The marathon, which had been scheduled for that spring, was postponed. It eventually ran, but the decision to pull the race during those weeks was a recognition that a city in crisis is not a city ready to celebrate.
It is worth remembering, especially in the context of 2025, when the race took place in the shadow of the January wildfires that killed at least 29 people and destroyed thousands of homes across the Los Angeles basin. The 2025 edition ran as scheduled, with over 26,000 participants including firefighters who had spent weeks on the front lines of the fires. The race that year felt like something a city chooses to do when it is deciding to recover.
The 2026 Edition
The 41st running of the ASICS Los Angeles Marathon takes place on Sunday, March 8, 2026. More than 27,000 runners are expected at Dodger Stadium for the 9:00 AM start. The elite field features defending champions Matt Richtman and Tejinesh Tulu, both returning to defend titles they won by razor-thin margins or decisive gaps last March.
Richtman is the story everyone will be watching. At 26, in just his third marathon, he is trying to do what very few have done at this race: win it twice. The course record of 2:06:35 is there to be chased if conditions cooperate.
The race runs west through the city. Through downtown and Hollywood and Beverly Hills and the flat miles of Century City. Past the street corners where people have been standing since 1986 to watch strangers run by and cheer for them anyway.
Stadium to the Stars. It is still exactly that.
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