WCH Tokyo 25 champion Dunfee among 25 global champions at MOWA ceremony | News | Tokyo 25

Donations to the Museum of World Athletics (MOWA) not only preserve the heritage of the sport, but also perhaps bring good luck.

Before arriving in Japan for the World Athletics Championships Tokyo 25, Canadian race walker Evan Dunfee agreed to donate the bib and cap he wore while setting his 35km race walk world record in March.

Dunfee proceeded to win the first gold medal awarded in Tokyo, which he brought to the MOWA donation ceremony on Tuesday (16). For now, however, Dunfee kept the medal.

“My career has taught me that those goals are worth chasing. Those dreams are worth having,” he said. 

Dunfee was one of 10 athletes contributing to the ever-expanding MOWA collection during the ceremony at the Tokyo Metropolitan Government Building.

The festivities took place at the MOWA exhibition, which will have been viewed by more than 200,000 visitors – a record for any MOWA display – by the end of the championships. Olympic artefacts highlight a trip to the 45th floor observatory, while a larger collection from the World Athletics Championships are featured on the second floor. 

World Athletics President Sebastian Coe accepted the donations from a group he termed “wide and far apart,” that also included sprinter Don Quarrie, 800m runner Ellen van Langen, three marathoners, two hurdlers, decathlete Trey Hardee and high jumper Nicola Olyslagers, who could not attend because she is preparing for her competition but was represented by her husband Rhys. 

Michael Burke, the founding patron of the museum, presented the athletes with special MOWA donor pins.

As a testament to the drawing power of the exhibition, global champions – many who have already contributed items – attended the ceremony, including Billy Mills, returning to the city of his Olympic 10,000m triumph in 1964, plus Willie Banks, Kevin Young, Lasse Viren, Rosa Mota and Daley Thompson to name but a very few of the star-studded gathering.

“Sitting in this group today is really the history of our sport,” Coe said.

Heritage Director Chris Turner began the ceremony by introducing 84-year-old Japanese running legend Kenji Kimihara, the 1966 Boston Marathon champion who won the Olympic silver medal in the marathon in 1968. He donated his singlet and bib from the 1972 Munich Games, where he placed fifth.

“The race lives on in my mind,” Kimihara said. 

Mizuki Noguchi, the 2004 Olympic marathon gold medallist and silver medallist at the 2003 World Championships, continued the tradition of Japanese long-distance running. She presented the bib from her Asian record victory in the 2005 Berlin Marathon, where she set world bests at 25km and 30km along the way, and donated a pair of her training shoes from the 2008 season. 

She said to tell young athletes to think about their goal every day during their training: “That moment is waiting for you.”

Another marathoner, Constantina Dita, who is now the President of the Romanian Athletics Federation, was the 2008 Olympic champion at age 38, making her the oldest runner to achieve that distinction. She donated one of two pairs of shoes she was given by ASICS for the Beijing Games.

The ceremony then turned to the shorter distances, to fete Jamaica’s Quarrie. He donated the tracksuit he wore on the podium during the 1976 Montreal Olympics where he received the gold medal in the 200m. Quarrie also won the silver in the 100m.

Van Langen, the Olympic gold medallist in the 800m in 1992, presented her podium jacket with the famous tulip emblem from the Netherlands.

Like Quarrie, she remained in the sport as a manager and meeting director. 

“I like to bring athletes where I ended up in my career,” van Langen said.

Joanna Hayes, the 2004 Olympic gold medallist in the 100m hurdles for the United States, took a different path, becoming a coach. She is in Tokyo guiding Olympic 400m hurdles champion Rai Benjamin. 

Because a lot of Hayes’ memorabilia from 2004 was lost during evacuation from the January fires in California, she donated the one singlet she still has from that year: one from her season-ending World Athletics Final victory in Monaco.  

Hayes was also a champion in the 400m hurdles but decided not to contest both hurdles races. “I said: ‘I don’t want to be good in both, I want to be great in one,’ and the one I chose to be great in is the 100m hurdles,” she explained.

Hardee was strictly a pole vaulter until his coaches convinced him to try the decathlon, so he went from a “fun event to an incredibly difficult event,” he said. The 2009 and 2011 world champion for the USA donated his spikes from the London 2012 Olympics, where he won the silver medal.

Ladji Doucoure, who won gold medals in the 110m hurdles and the 4x100m at the 2005 World Championships, compared the pressure of competing in the French version of ‘Dancing With the Stars’ with running.

“Dancing is easy for everybody,” he said, “but track and field is hard.”

The final presentation was one that Turner called “the most personal thing the collection has ever received.” Olyslagers, who won the 2024 and 2025 world indoor high jump titles for Australia and is a two-time Olympic silver medallist, donated her training diary from 2022. Her husband Rhys said the diary, which includes notes as well as artwork, speaks for her journey and process.  

“She can have it back any time,” Turner said.

In the meantime, it will remain a treasured part of the collection.

Karen Rosen for World Athletics Heritage