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Most New York accessories don’t require months of training and an early trip to Staten Island. This one does—and it comes with a skyline.
New York Road Runners has unveiled the 2026 TCS New York City Marathon finisher medal, celebrating 50 years since the race first took runners through all five boroughs. That 1976 edition also introduced official finisher medals, so this year’s hardware marks two anniversaries.
The design gives runners a miniature version of the city they’ve just conquered. An abstract, sculptural skyline forms a continuous circle around the center, with buildings radiating outward in a sunburst shape. The medal also incorporates the five bridges along the 26.2-mile course.
Made of zinc with an electroplated gold finish, the medal measures 3.5 inches across, slightly larger than this year’s predecessor. Its center medallion remains the same size as the 2025 version, at 2.12 inches. The ribbon gets an anniversary treatment, too: a design nodding to the 1970s, featuring the marathon logo, the 50th anniversary mark and all five boroughs.
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“The design captures what makes the TCS New York City Marathon so special, from the energy of New York City to the shared human experience that comes to life on its streets each year,” said Juliette Morris, NYRR’s chief marketing and digital officer.
Getting to the finished design took a year. NYRR’s creative and marketing team started with 26 ideas, then worked through multiple rounds of refinements before sending the chosen medal into production.
The anniversary reaches back to October 24, 1976, when the marathon expanded beyond Central Park for the U.S. Bicentennial. The original 1970 race had consisted of four-plus laps of the park, with just 55 finishers. Five decades after borough-spanning races, nearly 60,000 runners are expected to cross the Central Park finish line on Sunday, November 1.
The circular skyline is intended to represent the boroughs’ unity and the connections the marathon creates across communities and generations. For finishers, it will also represent something considerably more immediate: they made it.
And once that gold-finished skyline is hanging around your neck, you have an excellent excuse to wear it to brunch, dinner and every conversation within earshot.