Bart Swings and Lianne van Loon win Shanghai marathon opener

Bart Swings and Lianne van Loon won the Shanghai opener of the World Skate Marathon Tour on March 29, with World Skate putting the event at Bund Bull Square and calling it the first stop of the 2026 series. The race carried the kind of scale that separates a marquee marathon from a routine stop: more than 1,200 athletes took part, spanning professional, amateur and youth categories.

Shanghai was not framed as a one-off showcase. World Skate described it as a fixed annual calendar date for the marathon tour, and its 2026 season materials placed the Shanghai stage first on the schedule. The event listing also split the competition into PRO, Masters and Amateur categories, reinforcing that this was built as a full tour stop, not just an elite race for the front pack.

The winning names matter because marathon skating rewards a different skill set than sprint or short-track racing. Over a long-distance pack race, pace control, positioning, drafting and energy conservation decide as much as raw speed. Swings and van Loon separated themselves in that environment, which is exactly what gives a marathon result real weight: the winner has to manage the field, not just outrun it in a short burst.

World Skate’s own reporting on Shanghai underlined the scale again, noting that the streets filled with pros, amateurs and kids and that a crowd was present from the early hours. That kind of turnout is part spectacle, part competitive statement. It shows why the marathon tour still occupies a central place in roller sports: the same course can crown elite winners and absorb a deep field of participants without shrinking the racing stakes.

Shanghai’s result also fed directly into the season picture. World Skate’s ranking page showed that the marathon stop was used to update World Skate Marathon Tour standings after the race, which makes the opener more than a ceremonial start. For Swings and van Loon, the win was a scoreboard result and an early points marker in a tour that uses its biggest city stages to set the pecking order for the rest of the season.