The event, the world’s largest women’s marathon and the only women's road race with a World Athletics Platinum label, is scheduled for March 13.

World Athletics said the increase in prize money is "welcome news to the world of road running" after the COVID-19 pandemic decimated the race calendar.

Organisers of the event in Japan said earlier this month that they are planning to hold the marathon with a full field of 22,000.

It hosted 21,436 runners in 2019, but due to the COVID-19 outbreak, it only staged an elite race with 110 athletes in 2020, an event won by Japan’s Mao Ichiyama in a course record of 2 hours 20min 29sec.

The 2021 race was held as the first mass-participation road race in Japan since the COVID-19 pandemic started and welcomed 4,704 local runners.

Entries for the 2022 edition are due to open next month.

Nagoya Women’s Marathon organisers are confident that by March conditions will have eased enough to ensure they can fulfil their plans of having full fields but will revert to holding a virtual event if they have to scale it back.

Japan's COVID-19 cases have steadily declined in recent weeks following the lifting of a state of emergency in areas including capital Tokyo, while the country has also fully vaccinated more than 60 per cent of its population.

The pandemic forced the Tokyo 2020 Olympic and Paralympic Games to be held behind closed doors.

The first Nagoya Women’s Marathon can trace its history back to 1980 when it started as a 20 kilometres race in Toyohashi in Aichi.

After its first two years there, the venue changed to Nagoya, in the Nagasaki Prefecture, for the third edition in 1982 and converted to a marathon race for the 1984 event, when the winner was New Zealand’s Glenys Quick.

The 2011 race was cancelled due to the Tōhoku earthquake that March but the following year the event was held on a new course and was opened to the public for the first time.

Around 15,000 runners took part that year, with Russia’s Albina Mayorova crossing the line first.