The Oldest Man at the World Championships Is 106. He Missed His First Event. Then He Set a World Record.

Sawang Janpram was entered in the men's shot put on Monday morning.

He is 106 years old. He is from Thailand, he was a schoolteacher and then a primary-school principal, and he did not touch a sport until he was 80 — a fact worth sitting with for a second, because he has since won 78 medals. He got into it because a friend of his became bedridden and he did not fancy the same ending, and because his daughter had taken up athletics and looked better for it. His daughter is 74. She competes too. At the World Masters Games in Taipei last year they won medals in the same week.

He did not throw on Monday. He withdrew — personal circumstances, per the local paper, no elaboration. His discus is on the 27th and his javelin on the 29th, and the organisers have a ceremony planned for him on the second of those days.

So the oldest competitor at a world championship currently under way in Daegu had, at the time we first published this, not competed at all. (He has since. There is an update at the foot of this piece, and it is worth the wait.) That is the honest state of it, and it is a more useful way into this event than the one you would get from the promotional copy, because the thing that makes the World Masters Athletics Championships worth your attention is not that a 106-year-old shows up. It is that 7,400 other people did, they all paid their own way, and most of them are not going to win anything either.

The entry requirement is that you are 35

There is one rule. You have to be 35 or older. That is the whole qualification.

You do not need a time, a record, a ranking, a federation's blessing or a sponsor. You need to be over 35 and you need to pay — your flights, your hotel, your entry fee, all of it, out of your own pocket. Then you get a lane at Daegu Stadium, the 66,000-seat bowl built for the professional World Championships in 2011, the one where Usain Bolt false-started out of the 100 metres final.

The opening ceremony was on 21 August, with IVE and a run of trot singers on the bill and delegations from most of the 106 competing countries in the stands. Competition started the following morning and runs to 3 September across eight venues — the main stadium, the auxiliary stadium next door, Gyeongsan Civic Stadium, Suseong Family Park, the city's athletics centre, and road courses laid out on ordinary Daegu streets.

Thirty-four events: 17 on the track, 11 in the field, 6 on the road. Everything is split into five-year age bands, which is how a 106-year-old and a 36-year-old can be at the same championship without either being a novelty act.

One number correction before we go further, because it is in most of the coverage and it is wrong. You will see 11,176 reported as the number of athletes. It isn't. That figure — sometimes given as 11,014 — is athletes plus accompanying family, officials and volunteers. The organising committee's own athlete count is 7,409; World Masters Athletics, working from a slightly later registration cutoff, says 7,476. Call it about 7,400. The difference matters, because 3,600 of those people flew to Korea not to compete but to watch someone they are related to.

Between them the athletes filed 12,277 event entries. That is roughly 1.7 events each. Having crossed the world at their own expense, a lot of them entered everything they could get into. One British competitor is in seven. One Korean is in seven.

What has actually happened

22 August. Korea's first gold, and a good one. 김철균 (Kim Chul-kyun) won the M55 pole vault at 3.55 metres. He is a former national-team vaulter who competed at the 1988 Seoul Olympics, the 1992 Barcelona Olympics and the 1996 Atlanta Olympics — and who, thirty years on from the last of those, was back on a runway in a Korean stadium going over a bar.

Also on the first day: 도도환 (Do Do-hwan), 77, ran 15.63 in the M75 100 metres heats. And 임을용 (Im Eul-yong), 79, ran 19.34 in his — reportedly his return to a track after a gap of about sixty years. He has the 400 metres on the 29th.

23 August. The 10km road race drew 1,330 entrants from 52 countries. 신행철 (Shin Haeng-chul) won the M70 division in 41:49. He also holds the M70–74 world record for the marathon at 2:54:10. Those are two separate facts that get merged in a lot of the write-ups — the world record is the marathon, the 41:49 is a 10km in Daegu — and both are impressive enough not to need conflating.

The same morning, 김명락 (Kim Myung-rak), aged 90, lined up in the second semi-final of the M90 100 metres. He finished last of six, in 44.83 seconds. His daughter and his granddaughter were in the stand.

He said afterwards that the plan had been not to fall over, and to think about his own stamina rather than anyone else's. He finished. At this championship that is the achievement, and everybody in the stadium understands it as one.

The people who are not the story

Pull the entry list apart and it stops being a curiosity and starts being a portrait of what happens to athletes after the part that gets televised.

김희선 (Kim Hee-sun) is 63 and entered in the high jump. In 1988, in Seoul, she cleared 1.92m and became the first Korean woman to reach an Olympic high jump final — still the only one. She broke the Korean national record eleven times. The 1.93m she jumped in 1990 has now stood for 36 years. Her husband, 도호영 (Do Ho-young), 66, is also a former national-team athlete, and he is entered in the high jump too.

Joetta Clark Diggs is at the American end of the same story. Four Olympics — Seoul, Barcelona, Atlanta, Sydney — as an 800 metres runner, eleven US national titles, a personal best of 1:57.84. In Daegu she is entered in the 100 and 200 metres, which is not her event and never was. She is the daughter of Joe Louis Clark, the New Jersey principal Morgan Freeman played in Lean on Me, and the mother of Talitha Diggs, a world-champion 400 metres runner. Three generations.

Ser-Od Bat-Ochir of Mongolia is entered in the 5,000 metres and the half marathon. He is the first person to run six Olympic marathons.

문기숙 (Moon Gi-sook), 64, has more than seventy marathon podium finishes and ran the 10km. Dainis Kūla, who won the javelin at the Moscow Olympics in 1980, is throwing the javelin. James Beckford, Jamaica's long jump silver medallist from Atlanta, is jumping.

And the athletes' oath at the opening ceremony was taken by 공한식 (Gong Han-sik), 75, a Daegu local in the 100 metres, and Sarah Roberts of Britain, who is 75 or 76 depending on which side of the world you ask, and who has spent the last twelve months setting W75 world records at 800 metres, 1500, the mile, 3000 and 5000.

The part nobody planned for

They are doing this in the worst Korean summer on record.

Daegu is the city Koreans call 대프리카 — Daegu plus Africa — and it earned the name long before this year. This August it has been competing in a heatwave that set a national daily-mean temperature record twice in the first week, broke, came back, and had its warnings expanded across most of the inland regions again on 24 August. 처서, the solar term that is supposed to mean the heat retreats, was the 23rd. It didn't.

We wrote about what this summer has done to the country in our piece on the Korean summer. What it means here is narrower and sharper: a 90-year-old ran a 100-metre semi-final, and a 79-year-old is going to run a 400, in conditions that the Korean government spent the same week telling people to stay indoors to avoid. The organisers have around 1,200 volunteers and interpreters on the ground — the committee's own count of its formal volunteer corps is 844 — free shuttles from the airports and stations, and information desks at five transport hubs. None of that changes the temperature.

Why you have not read this anywhere

You more or less haven't, and the reason is unglamorous. Korea's English-language papers have covered it — the Korea JoongAng Daily ran a good piece on the returning Olympians, the Korea Times previewed it in May, Seoul Economic Daily covered the opening. Beyond that: nothing. No wire service. No general-interest coverage anywhere outside Korea-focused press.

Which is a strange gap, because the ingredients are not obscure. Eleven thousand people came to a Korean city. A hundred and six countries sent someone. The oldest man in the field was born during the 1918 influenza pandemic and took up throwing at 80.

The likeliest explanation is that it does not fit a category. It is not elite sport, so the sports desks are not interested. It is not a human-interest story about one person, because there are 7,400 of them. It is a world championship where the median competitor will not medal, has no coach, took annual leave to be there, and will fly home on Thursday.

That is also, fairly obviously, the appeal.

The number that is actually the story

Of about 7,400 athletes, 225 are 80 or over. Twenty-six are 90 or over. One is 106.

Read that as a survival curve and it is bleak. Read it as an entry list and it is the opposite: 26 people over the age of 90 filled in a form, paid a fee, booked a flight to a foreign country in the hottest month it has ever had, and put themselves on a start line where they were fairly likely to come last.

Kim Myung-rak came last. In 44.83 seconds. His granddaughter watched him do it.

Sawang Janpram was entered in the discus on the 27th.

Update, 28 August: he threw

On the morning of 27 August, on the field at Daegu Stadium, wearing bib number 6975, Sawang Janpram entered the men's 105-and-over discus and threw the one-kilogram disc 7.59 metres.

That is an amateur world record for the age group — nine centimetres past the 7.50m that stood before it. He won gold. It was 33°C.

Two qualifications, both of which make it better rather than worse. He was the only entrant: there was nobody else over 100 in the field, so the gold was his provided he was not disqualified. And the Korean reporters who watched him all noted the same thing anyway — that he went through his preparation and every throw with complete seriousness, as though the result were in any doubt at all.

Afterwards he said:

"경기를 마칠 수 있어 행복하고 금메달을 따게 돼 기쁩니다"

"I'm happy I was able to finish the competition, and glad to have won the gold."

Finishing first. The medal second.

Which is, almost exactly, what Kim Myung-rak said after coming last of six in the 100 metres — that the plan had been not to fall, and that he was proud to have got round. A 90-year-old who finished last and a 106-year-old who set a world record gave the same answer about what they had come for.

He has the javelin on the 29th.

For Korea's other complicated relationship with an ageing sport, see ssireum, explained — a national tradition that had to be inscribed by UNESCO before Koreans took it seriously again. And for the summer these athletes are competing in, Korean summer, explained.

Images. All three are charts we built ourselves from the Daegu organising committee's own published registration figures, because we could not find a single licence-clean photograph of this event. That is worth explaining rather than hiding. Korea.net and KOCIS, our usual source for freely licensed Korean official photography, appear not to have covered the championships at all. Daegu Metropolitan City's newsroom does have photographs, but the pages carry a blanket copyright notice and no KOGL type marking, and an unmarked page is not an open licence — so we left them. The organising committee's gallery states no licence. And Wikimedia Commons has photographs of Daegu Stadium, but South Korea has no freedom of panorama at all, which means a third party's CC licence on a photograph of a building exterior does not clear the architect's copyright underneath it. So: no photographs. Three charts instead.

The charts show the age tail (about 7,400 athletes, 225 aged 80 or over, 26 aged 90 or over, one aged 106), the continental split of entrants, and the single number at the end of the tail. All figures are the organising committee's June registration snapshot as reported by 헤럴드경제, cross-checked against World Masters Athletics' own August press release. They are registration figures, not a turnstile count, and the two sources differ slightly because they were taken at different cutoffs — we have used the committee's numbers throughout and said so on the artwork.

Reported from Korean-language coverage published 17–24 August 2026 — principally 매일신문, 국제뉴스, 경향신문, 헤럴드경제 and 한국일보 — together with the championships' own English site and World Masters Athletics' press releases. Results were as of the morning of 24 August at first publication; the discus update was added on 28 August and verified against 연합뉴스, 세계일보, 조선비즈, 아시아경제, 서울신문 and 노컷뉴스, which agree on the distance, the category and the record. One outlet dates the throw to the 25th; the weight of reporting and the photo captions put it on the 27th, which is also the date the organisers scheduled. The meet runs to 3 September and the rest will date quickly. Deliberately left out: a widely-summarised claim that Hwang Young-cho left the official course during the 10km road race, which we could not confirm in any second source and will not print on one; the Thai and hangul spellings of Sawang Janpram's name, which we could not verify against any original-script source and would rather omit than guess at; and an age-by-five-year-band breakdown of the full field, which is not in any public reporting — the committee published only the 80-plus, 90-plus and 100-plus counts, and the start-list platform that holds the rest is a bot-blocked single-page app we could not extract cleanly. Where sources disagree we have said so in the text: Sarah Roberts is 75 in the Korean press and 76 in Athletics Weekly; Shin Haeng-chul is 70 in most reports and 71 in one; the volunteer count is 844 or about 1,200 depending on whether interpreters are included.