The inaugural World Athletics Ultimate Championships take place this weekend in Budapest, Hungary.A three-day event which features some of the world’s biggest track and field stars competing for a share of a $10 million prize pot, the Ultimate Championships has, in the words of World Athletics president Sebastian Coe, been “unashamedly aimed at television”.Pole vault world record holder Mondo Duplantis will be in Hungary, but the highlights are arguably the middle-distance events. The women’s 800m features the world leader Audrey Werro, Olympic champion Keely Hodgkinson and 400m hurdles world champion Femke Broeders-Bol, with Jakob Ingebrigtsen and Josh Kerr renewing their rivalry in the men’s 1,500m.“I believe in the concept, it’s about time to try something and to innovate within athletics,” two-time Olympic champion Duplantis told reporters on a pre-event video call. “I am very confident that we will see a lot of good battles because the best are going to be there.”But what exactly is the World Athletics Ultimate Championships and how does it differ from other track and field events? And why is black grass being used?A trophy and $150,000 to each championUnapologetically, this is about pitting top athletes against one another.The Championships consists of 28 finals across three evenings, but not every traditional track and field discipline will be involved.Qualification, for most competitors, is achieved through their world ranking. There are wildcard entries for the 2024 Olympic and 2025 world champions, plus the Diamond League winners from Brussels last week.Mondo Duplantis, appearing on the red carpet Thursday, will be competing in the pole vault on Friday. (Shaun Botterill/Getty Images)Each individual champion takes home $150,000, with winnings scaled down across the rest of the field. Every athlete gets a share of the $10m prize pot, the biggest in track and field history.Coe, a double Olympic 1,500m gold medallist who set three middle-distance world records in 41 days in 1973, calls financial support the “third pillar” of athlete welfare — in addition to physical and mental wellbeing.There will be no medals. The winners are given a trophy instead. And though national team kits will be worn, there are no quotas for each country, unlike at an Olympic Games where there’s a limit of three per nation per event.“If we’ve got five American sprinters and five Jamaican sprinters, or four Kenyans (in a distance event), so be it,” Coe said. “We want this to feel and look different, (to be) high octane and high impact.”Black grass and a re-engineered stadiumCoe spoke with media, including The Athletic, at the London Diamond League in July, explaining the rationale behind the event, which is a permanent addition to the end of each even year. He’s into the final 12 months of his decade-long presidency at World Athletics and wants to set the sport up to deal with long-standing issues of engagement.“Routinely, Olympics and World Championships attract audiences of one billion plus,” he explained. “I’m not saying that one year in that four is a fallow year, but it isn’t a year with the most broadcast-able moment that attracts the same numbers.”Coe simplified the problem: “We can’t be a professional sport if we have one year in four where we are not showcasing the best of our athletes under one roof.”It’s been a three-year project to bring this idea to life. What is Coe dreaming of? “We need to unlock those new and younger audiences without offending our bedrock support. These have got to be special, a future glimpse on what the sport could look like.”For this they have re-engineered the stadium and painted the grass black to better spotlight events. It’s all a part of the “focus on storytelling” that Coe envisions.Some of the finer details to try and maximize entertainment include a novel approach with lane allocation. Rather than seeding by qualifying time, athletes get to choose their preferred lane in advance, and these are then given out based on world ranking. “That makes for good reality TV,” Coe said in July.What does the programme look like?The 10,000m and 3,000m steeplechase have been cut, while deliberately limiting the number of qualified athletes means heats are scratched from all track events.Distances 800m and shorter start from the semifinals, while the 1,500m and 5,000m races are straight finals. Field events — high jump, pole vault, long jump and javelin — have been hand selected for both sexes.“They’re pretty self-explanatory (but) not fixed in tablets,” Coe told The Athletic in mid-August, nodding to the importance of popularity. “In 2028, we might look and say, ‘That discipline hasn’t worked, let’s replace it.'”There’s also triple jump for the women, and Coe said men’s hammer throw was included specifically because this event takes place in eastern Europe. There’s three Hungarians in the top-15 men’s hammer throwers all-time, an event in which the former Soviet Union and Belarus had historic success.“We’ve given it a local reflection because hammer probably wouldn’t make the Ultimates in two years’ time somewhere else,” he said, adding that cherry-picking events for home athletes is commonplace at Diamond League meets.(L-R) Cole Hocker, Josh Kerr and Jakob Ingebrigtsen during the men’s 1,500m final at the Paris Olympics. (Hannah Peters / Getty Images)What World Athletics call “exceptional invitations” are another wrinkle. Four Hungarian athletes, plus two of their relay teams, have been given wildcards to compete. Gianmarco Tamberi, the Olympic gold medallist in 2021 and five-time European champion, is a bonus pick for the men’s high jump.One outstanding athlete who has not qualified through the typical means can be added to each event, a rule that World Athletics made and then quickly broke by offering “exceptional invitations” to double Olympic champion Ingebrigtsen and mile world-record holder Kerr in the men’s 1,500m.Going against convention is a core principle of these championships. It has enabled a rematch between the best two middle-distance European men of this decade, who have not raced each other since August 2024.Kerr beat Ingebrigtsen in Budapest to win his first outdoor world title in 2023, and the Olympic final the following year was a race for the ages. In Paris, Kerr ran a British record but was outkicked to gold by U.S. athlete Cole Hocker, while Ingebrigtsen, despite leading for most of the race, finished fourth.Excluding pole vault and high jump, the jumps and throws include fields of only eight athletes competing over four rounds (compared to six attempts each in an Olympic final). After two jumps/throws, only the top six progress, and that is whittled down to four for the final attempt. There will be no ties or shared places — the maths means jump-offs are more likely to decide a winner.Keely Hodgkinson and Audrey Werro will be competing in the women’s 800m. (Julian Finney / Getty Images)Athletes as ‘lead content creators’For this to work, World Athletics is reimagining how global championships should be consumed.“There’s not been a mountain of difference in the way that athletics has been filmed and presented since I was competing — which was way back when,” Coe said at the London Diamond League, masking a serious point with humor.He accepts that plenty of their innovations and tweaks sound like “marketing speak” but believes they can make real change: fan voting, an app, win probabilities and predicted finishing positions as part of broadcast. The standout feature of the redesign is “centre court-style interviews” with athletes.Pre-event, they have scaled up media coverage — good news for subscribers to The Athletic. A red carpet was rolled out at the press conference, another element that Coe wants to avoid being “formulaic.” He wants not just greater publicity for athletes, but a better understanding of their careers and personalities.Usain Bolt on the red carpet ahead of the World Athletics Ultimate Championship. (Shaun Botterill / Getty Images)World Athletics are confident about the event, as risky as trying something new can be in sport, for a couple of reasons.Firstly, the location. Coe said three years ago Budapest hosted the “best World Championships in terms of stadium capacity, athlete performance and the way it re-engaged people with our sport.” Ticket sales, as of mid-August, were promising, with the 22,000-capacity set up at the stadium 75 percent sold out.Secondly, there are marketable names. While Olympic and world champions Tara Davis-Woodhall (long jump) and Lyles (100m and 200m) will not compete because of injury, they are still fulfilling their “lead content creator” and “ultimate MC and creative adviser” roles.Usain Bolt, the 100m and 200m world-record holder, holds an ambassadorial role as “ultimate legend.” Duplantis has created the championship anthem, and will perform it live in the stadium.World Athletics are also producing a three-part documentary series — akin to Netflix’s Sprint in 2024 and 2025 — following Hodgkinson and Broeders-Bol (800m), plus training partners Melissa Jefferson-Wooden and Sha’Carri Richardson, who are the past two 100m world champions.Coe will step down as World Athletics president next year, so this is a chance to make a significant, lasting change.These Ultimate Championships are intended to be a successful competition in their own right, and a vehicle through which they can stress-test ideas and innovations which might improve things at the two big global events, the Olympics and World Championships.“The analogy I would use is not everything you see in Paris Fashion Week ends up on a hanger in a retail store, but there are derivatives of that,” Coe said. “There are things we will learn from this. It’s our fourth year.”