Juntendo Strikes Back — My Top Story of Hakone Ekiden 2026

Sports Hochi newspaper from Jan 4:. Headline reads "Juntendo are back."

The Hakone Ekiden might wrap up on January 3rd, but the post-race coverage rolls on well into the month and beyond. This year, the fresh green of Aoyama Gakuin and their generational talent, Asahi Kuroda, have dominated screen and print media, but for me personally, the school’s historic three-peat and athletic heroics weren’t the main story of Hakone 2026.

That title belongs to Juntendo University.

In the 2025 race, Juntendo finished 11th, missing out on 10th place and the final “seeding” spot by a handful of seconds. This might sound like a small piece of administrative misfortune, but finishing outside the automatic qualifying places can send a team into a swirling negative spiral that’s hard to climb out of, affecting everything from confidence to recruitment, reputation to sponsorship.

This year, Juntendo stuck back in fantastic fashion, crossing the line in third place and vanquishing that very dark cloud that would have been hanging over every practice session for the previous 12 months.

Juntendo Strikes Back! A glorious tale of heartbreak, resolve and redemption..

Hakone Ekiden Seeding: Some Very Expensive Seconds

Juntendo University is synonymous with the Hakone Ekiden. The school has a storied history with the iconic race, including eleven victories, as well as producing the first-ever Yama-no-Kami (God of the Mountain) in Masato Imai and in recent years, the standout steeplechaser Ryuji Miura.

Juntendo always runs Hakone. It’s as simple as that. And the runners who pull on the distinctive blue singlet and iconic red and white tasuki know they are responsible for this legacy.

However, in the 2025 race, whether it was the weight of expectation or simply weighty legs, the team’s anchor runner lost out on a four-way sprint to the line by seconds, placing the team in 11th and kicking off the start of an extremely challenging year, both physically and mentally.

You can't underestimate how expensive those seconds were.

For schools like Juntendo, there is a stigma that comes with not claiming a seeding spot. The nature of Ekiden is that — rightly or wrongly — there will inevitably be talk of not honouring the hard work and efforts of those runners who came before and not passing something forward to those who come after.

But it's not just that. Without a seeding spot, the team is forced to take a road fraught with short-term and potentially long-term peril.

For Lord of the Rings fans, this is the treacherous route through the Mines of Moria.

Navigating the Road Back to Hakone

In the short term, alongside not trying to overcompensate in sessions and increasing the risk of injury, it means having to navigate the notorious Hakone Ekiden qualifier in October: an all-out half-marathon where the combined times of ten runners are tallied, and the ten fastest teams advance.

Anything can happen in this race. Not only have conditions grown increasingly hot in recent years, driving dehydration and DNFs higher, but the margin between a Hakone spot and not is down to a handful of seconds; in fact, it was down to 1 second a couple of years ago.

Sending a second-string team is not an option; your best runners have to be firing on all cylinders to secure qualification. And if they do, they then have to peak again two months later for the main event. It's incredibly challenging. (In Juntendo’s case, they performed well at the qualifier for 2026, coming in second place, but this by no means guarantees success in the big dance. Just ask Chuo Gakuin University who won the qualifier but finished 11th in Hakone.)

The other cost is potentially more damaging: the long-term negative spiral that can start the moment you lose your seed. The school’s reputation takes a hit, and recruitment gets harder because top high school runners want to run Hakone. If automatic qualification isn't guaranteed, these runners may look elsewhere. And if this continues for a couple of years, it becomes very difficult to reverse the trend.  

And there’s also a commercial side to it. Hakone is visibility. It’s TV time, headlines, stories, highlight reels, name recognition. When you’re not in the race, you’re not being seen, and that matters for sponsors and partners.

It’s why one “bad year” can quietly become two. Not because the runners suddenly forgot how to run, but because everything around the program gets harder.

If you’re a runner, you’ll know that the best performances come from being relaxed and running without pressure. So imagine how the Juntendo team felt knowing what was on the line.

A Mighty Roar: The Sound of Redemption

Well, this is exactly why Juntendo are the story of Hakone 2026 for me. Fast forward to lunchtime on January 3rd, and the team are waiting just beyond the finish tape for their anchor runner to come home.

They are waiting in the same spot as the previous year when the bottom fell out of the team in that final sprint.

But this time was different.

As second-year Haruka Yamamoto crossed the line in third place, having pulled the team up from fifth, the roar that came out of the collective Juntendo runners and coaches was something else.

It wasn’t just giddy excitement. It was a guttural roar; a banshee wail, a deep-from-within release. The sound of an enormous weight being lifted. Graaaahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh.

Over the two days, the runners put in outstanding performances. Six out of the ten clocked school-ever best times on their respective legs, and as a collective, they set new school records for the out leg, return leg and overall race.

Through pure grit, determination, and self-belief, they overcame what must have been an incredibly tough 12 months to bring their school back to where it belongs.

So while Aoyama will get all the plaudits, and quite rightly, Juntendo deserves a share of the storytelling too. This wasn’t just a good race. It was a proper strike back. The force was definitely with them.

Odds and Ends: Quotes, Numbers and Loose Threads

The strength to strike back: After the race, team captain Hiroyuki Ishioka put it simply: “We got stronger!” Well, you can’t argue with that.

Youth on their side: Six of the ten runners Juntendo deployed at Hakone were second-years. This team has plenty of room to grow.

Nagato kantoku keeping it real: For all the excitement, head coach Shunsuke Nagato stayed grounded: “You can’t win a championship just by hoping it happens. If you want to win, you have to train with that purpose in mind.” He’s clearly setting his sights on something bigger.

You’ve gotta have belief: It’s become a tradition for film crews to show up at Ekiden practice grounds the day after Hakone, looking for the post-race highs (and the inevitable lows). As you can imagine, the mood around the Juntendo camp was buoyant, and the coaches gave passionate speeches about the power of belief. Does this team believe it can win Hakone again? I think it might.

A new balancing act: Juntendo is sponsored by New Balance, who also back their women’s team, which is getting progressively stronger too. Schools with both teams often lean heavily one way or the other, but Juntendo feels like they’re building something on both sides. And it’s great to see a sponsor supporting that, because it’s not always the case.

Spare a thought for Toyo: Toyo University shares a lot of similarities with Juntendo. It’s a regular at Hakone, with multiple victories to its name. In 2026, however, the team finished 14th, breaking a run of 21 consecutive automatic seeding spots. That’s going to be a tough one to swallow, and I hope they bounce back quickly.