A $20 Casio just won the Mexico City Marathon

Cristhian Pacheco just won the 2026 Mexico City Marathon in 2:10:03 wearing what looks to be a Casio F-91W. Yep, the little $20 digital watch that has been around forever. And the funny bit is that his prize included $50,000 and a Garmin watch.

So while plenty of runners obsess over GPS accuracy, heart rate, pace alerts and recovery scores, Pacheco crossed the line first with none of that on his wrist. Race photos show the familiar black Casio with the blue trim, and it looks very much like the F-91W.

About as basic as running watches get

The F-91W is almost the complete opposite of what you would expect to see on an elite marathon runner in 2026. It weighs just 21 grams and gives you the time, date, an alarm, a backlight and a basic stopwatch. Casio rates its battery for around seven years.

Even the stopwatch tells you how far removed this thing is from today’s running watches. Its measuring capacity tops out at 59 minutes and 59.99 seconds, so it cannot even record Pacheco’s 2 hour 10 minute race as one continuous stopwatch session. There are no kilometre splits, no GPS track and certainly no post-race recovery analysis waiting in an app.

🏆🏃‍♂️ ¡El Maratón de la Ciudad de México Telcel 2026 ya tiene a sus campeones!

Así quedó el Top 3 de la rama varonil:

🥇 Cristhian Simeon Pacheco Mendoza 🇵🇪 — 2:10:03
🥈 Anbesa Lencho Tefaye 🇪🇹 — 2:11:25
🥉 Balew Yihunie Derseh 🇪🇹 — 2:11:58#MaratónDeLaCiudadDeMéxicoTelcel2026 pic.twitter.com/9dzDyHN97k

— Maratón de la Ciudad de México Telcel (@MaratonCDMX) August 30, 2026

None of that seemed to bother him. Pacheco stayed with the leading group through the first part of the race before making his move later on, eventually winning by more than a minute. Anbesa Lencho Tefaye finished second in 2:11:25, with Balew Yihunie Derseh third in 2:11:58.

That makes the watch choice particularly fun because this wasn’t somebody jogging around with a retro Casio for the novelty of it. Pacheco is a three-time Olympian and Pan American Games champion, and he has previously run 2:07:38 for the marathon. The man knows exactly what a serious racing setup looks like.

Elite runners keep making expensive watches look optional

We’ve seen variations of this before. When we looked at the watches worn by the leading runners at the 2026 London Marathon, the interesting thing wasn’t a rush towards the most expensive models. Lightweight Forerunners and relatively affordable dedicated running watches were everywhere.

More recently, Yomif Kejelcha wore a Amazfit Cheetah alongside Whoop while setting the half marathon world record. Again, the watch providing the useful race was not a hugely expensive one.

But Pacheco takes that idea several steps further. The F-91W isn’t a stripped-down GPS watch. It isn’t really a running watch at all, although its tiny weight and simple stopwatch have made it useful for sport for decades.

Casio has much more capable fitness watches these days. We even found that the G-Shock DW-H5600 can produce surprisingly decent running data when compared against a Garmin. But Pacheco apparently didn’t need any of that during the race.

And then comes the best part. Coverage of the Mexico City Marathon says the men’s and women’s winners received $50,000 plus a Garmin watch. So Pacheco started the morning with a €20 Casio on his wrist, ran 2:10:03, won the race and finished the day with a considerably smarter watch than the one he used to get there.