Kaçkar by UTMB: Two Thousand Runners, Sixty Countries, and a Results Board Nobody Published

Last year, the fog swallowed Kaçkar. The man who recalled it was the Governor of Rize, speaking at the opening ceremony of the second edition of Kaçkar by UTMB on the Ayder plateau. He remembered that in the first edition, cloud and rain blanketed the range, and runners moved through terrain they could not see. A race whose host mountain was absent from its own course. This year, Turkey's Minister of Youth and Sports, Osman Aşkın Bak, fired the start. Two thousand athletes from sixty countries. The Anadolu news agency recorded exactly that, and nothing more. No winner's name. No finish times. No course record. No splits at any distance. The Minister ran the twenty-kilometre course. Two agency sports reporters, Yusuf Özhan and Hasan Hüseyin Kul, also ran the twenty kilometres. A mountain race, and the only names printed in the report belong to people standing at the edge of the course. I read the final paragraph three times, looking for an athlete's name. There was none. And that empty space is precisely what deserves to be written about. UTMB does not sell a race, it sells the right to be named Ultra-Trail du Mont-Blanc was born in 2026 as a loop around the Mont-Blanc massif, crossing France, Italy and Switzerland. More than two decades later it is no longer a race. It is a franchise system called the UTMB World Series, a chain of qualifying events across continents, all pointing toward Chamonix. The fundamental difference between this system and track-and-road athletics lies in selection. Nobody enters Chamonix by running under a time standard. Entry comes through Running Stones, credits earned at qualifying races, followed by a lottery draw. The finals ticket is a weighted lottery slip, and the weight is priced by the organiser itself. In athletics, order is decided by the clock. Here, order is decided by the brand. Kaçkar by UTMB is one branch of that system, set in Turkey's Eastern Black Sea region, around the Kaçkar range and the Ayder plateau, where the terrain runs from roughly 1,300 metres to above 2,000. This past season was its second edition. The race director is Johan Essl, a UTMB central figure rather than a local organiser. That small detail says much about the model: the parent brand plants its own people to hold the standard, while the locality handles infrastructure and money. The money side reads clearly. Behind the race stand the Ministry of Youth and Sports, the Türkiye Tourism Promotion and Development Agency, the Rize Governorship and DOKA, the Eastern Black Sea Development Agency. The sponsor group includes Turkish Airlines, TOGG, Turkcell and Maxis, all national names. A mountain race backed by a national airline is a signal about the product: they sell a course, but first they sell a flight. Minister Bak described ultra marathon runners as world-class athletes with followers worldwide. He also spoke about the revenue sports tourism brings the country. But it was the Governor of Rize who offered the most telling comparison: he wants Ayder and Rize associated with major sporting organisations, the way Davos is associated with economic forums. That comparison is honest enough to make you stop. Davos is not famous because it has good athletes. Davos is famous because people go there to be seen. Rize is aiming at exactly that model: turning a place into an address, and an address into an annual appointment. Within that frame, President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan's presence in the region, along with ruling-party MPs and references to the women's volleyball team's 2026 achievements and the Istanbul 2027 European Games, are not incidental details. They form an axis: international event-hosting capacity, national prestige, tourism revenue. Vietnamese readers have reason to pay attention. We have mountains too. We have Sa Pa, the Vietnam Mountain Marathon, the Vietnam Trail Series, and urban marathons springing up every year in Da Nang, Ha Long and Can Tho. The question Kaçkar raises is not a question about Turkey. It is a question about the value of a mountain once that mountain is franchised. What the facts say, and what they keep silent Two thousand athletes from sixty countries is a good fact. It proves the distribution pull of the UTMB brand, and it proves the Eastern Black Sea region has the minimum infrastructure to absorb a crowd that size. A second-edition race that already draws sixty countries has solved the hardest part: selling places. But the fact stops there. It says nothing about sporting quality, because in trail running, quality can only be read through two things: course records and the depth of the elite field. Neither appears. No course record. No elite start list. No finish time for anyone. One technical peculiarity outsiders often miss deserves stating plainly: trail running has no ratified world record. There is no absolute benchmark to compare against, because every course has different gradients, altitude, surface and weather. No single mark is sacred enough to place on the scales. Performance is only meaningful relative to that course, on that day. So when there is no course record and no elite list, the analyst has nothing to hold. Any claim about a trail race's standard is then speculation in costume. The twenty-kilometre detail deserves a closer look. The Minister ran twenty kilometres. Reporters ran twenty kilometres. For a race bearing the UTMB name, the unit of prestige is not twenty kilometres but one hundred kilometres, or one hundred miles, with thousands of metres of accumulated climb. The presence of a short category shows where the event's centre of gravity sits: mass participation, not elite performance. The race is designed so many people can say they ran it. That is a sensible business choice, and it is also a statement of sporting ambition. I do not read the absence of individual results as a technical oversight. I read it as a sign of the event's communicative nature. Where performance is the product, the results page is the most-read page. Where imagery is the product, the results page can wait. The mountain becomes a currency Back to Running Stones. It is the smartest commercial invention in the UTMB model, and the hardest thing to explain to outsiders. An athlete runs a qualifier, finishes within the time limit, and receives a number of credits. Those credits convert into no money, no ranking, no medal. They only raise the weight of a lottery slip in Chamonix. In other words, the reward for hundreds of kilometres of climbing is the right to hope slightly harder. Such a mechanism only works when a brand is strong enough to turn hope into merchandise. Here I borrow a line I have long used when writing about football: the transfer market does not sell players, it sells dreams with a price tag. UTMB does exactly that with terrain. It does not sell the course in Chamonix, it sells the dream of standing at the Chamonix start line, and it prices that dream in stones. For a host country, the value lies elsewhere. The locality does not collect most of the stone revenue. It collects the revenue of two thousand people from sixty countries who must fly in, sleep, eat and buy. A national airline in the sponsor list is the physical conduit of that money flow. This is the classic pipeline model: a global brand creates the pull, aviation infrastructure moves the people, and the locality collects on-site spending. Read that way, the Minister's line about sports tourism revenue is technically accurate as economics. It simply belongs more to economics than to sport. One useful comparison: the Abbott World Marathon Majors runs on almost identical logic, with six major races and a mass-entry mechanism alongside elite invitations. The difference is that in marathons, speed remains real currency, so results must be published. In trail running, with no common currency, the brand issues its own. The runners who are never named Among the two thousand people at the Ayder start line, some will finish in daylight, some under headlamp, some will quit at the fourth aid station with blistered feet. None of them is named in the report. There are athletes who never reach the finish, yet keep running forever in my memory. I remember a day in Da Nang in 2026, when I skipped the award ceremony to follow a twenty-three-year-old cross-country runner named Lê Văn Tuấn back to Lien Chieu district. He won no medal. He finished ninth. But he had kept a running diary for five years, more than eighteen hundred pages, logging every session, every ache, every rainy day he still went out onto the sand. I wrote a 2,500-word piece called The Long-Distance Runner Who Needs No Finish Line. It was shared more than twelve thousand times. In 2026, Tuấn became national champion. I tell that story not to talk about myself. I tell it to point at a professional principle I believe in enough to have abandoned results-led writing years ago: records are only shadows, the human being is the course. A report like Anadolu's gives me scale, nationality of entrants, and the job titles of speakers. It gives me no human being. And based on my nearly thirty years of watching races, the blank part of a report is usually the part worth chasing. My heroes never lift trophies; they only whisper to the grass of the arena. At Kaçkar, the hero might be the last woman to finish, two hours after the course lights went out. I do not know her name. Neither does the report. The biggest risk in a mountain race is not performance, it is weather The Governor of Rize unwittingly supplied the most important risk datum of the whole equation. He remembered that in the first edition, fog and rain hid the Kaçkar range. The Black Sea mountain climate is extremely humid, and for a long high-altitude race that is a variable capable of destroying the entire value of the event in a single morning. For ultra-trail events, safety rules typically include mandatory kit, cut-off times at checkpoints, and medical and evacuation plans. The report does not mention these, and silence does not mean absence. But it reminds me that a mountain race's worth lies not in the opening stage but in the contingency plan. One small line from the Minister stayed with me. He said cameras are installed along the trails for taking and sharing photos. From a safety angle, that is a tracking system. From a communications angle, it is an image-production line. And for an event whose economic value depends on images spreading, fog is no longer merely weather. Fog is a loss line. Last year, Kaçkar was hidden. This year, if the sky is clear, it will be a complete communications victory and nobody will remember the first edition. If the weather turns, people will remember. On rules and anti-doping, the report raises no dispute. For a large mass-participation race, doping exposure is far lower than for record attempts on the track, and enforcement centres mainly on disqualification for kit violations. There is no risk signal, but no assurance either. That silence is a neutral fact, not a positive one. The counter-intuitive angle: a country can win without good athletes This is where I want to spend the most space, because it runs against the instinct of most sports readers. By instinct, we assume a country hosting a major mountain race must have a strong mountain-running culture. The Kaçkar report names no elite Turkish trail athlete. The Minister called ultra marathon runners world-class, but that is a description of a global sport, not an introduction to the people present. Not one result by a Turkish runner is cited. And yet the race drew two thousand people from sixty countries. That shows the event's economic model operates independently of the host country's sporting performance. A host nation does not need to produce champions. It needs mountains, flight routes, hotels, permits, and a government that understands prestige can be rented. This is an uncomfortable lesson for anyone who believes sport must always start from a competitive base. I have watched enough road races to see that trail running operates on a different order from athletics. On the road, a national record exists independently of the race's brand. On trails, with no world records, authority is surrendered to the brand. UTMB holds no records. UTMB holds the definition of what counts as a worthy race. That is a form of power World Athletics does not have and cannot have. When power belongs to a brand, what gets competed for is no longer speed but entry. The real race does not happen on the trail. It happens at the draw. And here the Turkish organisers played by the correct rules. They promised no school of mountain running. They promised a destination. They bought the right to be named inside the sport's largest system, and in return they received attention, imagery and people. The Governor of Rize compared it to Davos, and I think that was the most honest statement of the entire event, because it openly admits the goal is place-branding, not elite sport development. Athletics and human life share one thing: everyone has a finish line, but few run the right route. The organisers in Rize are running their right route. What remains open is whether that route leads to a genuine mountain-running culture, or merely to a tourism appointment dressed in a sports jersey. Trail racing in Southeast Asia shows a similar trend, as more regional races seek entry into international systems in exchange for entries and attention. I watch those races with curiosity and unease. Curiosity, because international traffic brings better infrastructure for local running communities. Unease, because the essence of mountain running, a bond between people and one specific patch of land, can be replaced by a standard written in an office in Europe. What to keep tracking There are signals a track-and-field journalist must record and re-check twelve months later. Next season's start list and results will be the first test. If the organiser publishes an elite list and finish times, the race's sporting quality will have somewhere to stand. If it again publishes nothing, we may conclude the product is not performance. The distance menu is another indicator. A race opening many short categories serves the mass market and imagery. A race investing in one hundred kilometres and one hundred miles serves sporting credibility. The two directions do not exclude each other, but no organiser can stand in both places on the same budget. Then sponsorship renewals. If Turkish Airlines, TOGG, Turkcell and Maxis remain in the third season, that is evidence tourism revenue has returned enough to convince the brands. If one withdraws, that is a signal about investment return. And finally, public money. The presence of the Ministry of Youth and Sports, DOKA and the Rize Governorship means part of the cost is paid with public funds. The event depends on budget decisions, and budgets depend on political cycles. That is a structural weakness no private sponsor can cover. I will keep an eye on Kaçkar next season. Not to see who wins, but to see whether anyone bothers to publish who won. Not a conclusion, but a way of posing the question The mountain is still there, after the crowd flew home. The lights on the trail are out. The photographs are posted. And in some office in Rize, someone is adding up how many visitors the second season brought, how many mentions online, how many hotel nights were filled. If you work in Vietnamese sport, this story is worth reading from another angle. We have mountains no less beautiful, trails that can match on difficulty, and trail communities growing year by year. What we do not yet have is a brand strong enough to sell a dream to foreigners at our own price. What I brought back from Kaçkar is a question about the price of letting a mountain carry someone else's name. When a range is absorbed into an international franchise system, it receives attention, people and imagery. In exchange, it gives away the right to define what a race on its own slopes should be. Perhaps that is a reasonable trade for a region that needs to be seen. Perhaps, after a few seasons, people will discover they were only renting out a backdrop. Last year the fog covered Kaçkar. This year people called the fog a memory. Next year, quite possibly, they will call it an unforeseen line item in the tourism budget. And behind all of it, two thousand people are still climbing, feet blistered, headlamps cutting through damp trail. None of them cares much about the strategic story above. They just want to finish before dark.