Kaçkar by UTMB second edition: 2,000 athletes, 60 countries and Turkey's sport-tourism equation

On the Ayder plateau, at an altitude of more than 1,300 metres above sea level, the fog over the Kaçkar mountains tends to lift slowly. On the opening morning of the second edition of Kaçkar by UTMB, Turkey's Minister of Youth and Sports, Osman Aşkın Bak, was present to fire the starting signal for 2,000 athletes from 60 countries. I read the Anadolu Ajansı report and immediately wrote a line in my tracking notebook: this is a story about scale, not a story about results. No winner's name, no finish times, no distance breakdown. Just 2,000 people, 60 countries, an opening ceremony and a great many speeches.

For someone who works as a sports data analyst, a report like this poses a central question: when performance information is zero, what is left to read? The answer lies in structure. An event with no competitive results can still contain a great deal of data about how a country organises, sponsors and sells its own image. Data does not create stories; it exposes the stories of others. That is how I approach Kaçkar by UTMB, a trail race now in its second season in Turkey's Eastern Black Sea region.

Context: a node within the UTMB brand system

To read this report correctly, it must be placed within its ecosystem. Kaçkar by UTMB does not belong to the World Athletics competition system. It is a node within the UTMB World Series — the commercial trail-running circuit run by UTMB Group (Ultra-Trail du Mont-Blanc), centred on Chamonix in France. Entry to the Mont-Blanc finals is not based on a time standard, but on Running Stones, points accumulated at qualifying races and then used as lottery weights. In other words, this is not a playground for national-team selection; it is the playground of a private brand system with global reach.

I remember my early years following competition systems, when I learned that the entry structure determines the nature of the story. A system built on national selection produces stories about nations and glory. A system built on accumulated points and lotteries produces stories about experience and personal journeys. Kaçkar belongs to the second category, and that shapes the entire way it is communicated.

This mechanism explains most of the figure of 60 countries. A race in the Turkish mountains does not spontaneously attract such a large international field through scenery alone. It attracts them because it sits within a system that athletes must pass through to collect points. The UTMB brand acts as a distribution channel; the host country acts as a destination. This is a mutually beneficial exchange, and I believe it is the core of the whole story.

Trail running is one of the fastest-growing segments of endurance sport over the past decade. This boom comes from urban middle classes seeking nature experiences and self-challenge. Brands like UTMB caught that wave by standardising the experience into a system with points, levels and a destination. This is a sophisticated marketing equation: selling people a journey with a goal, not merely a race.

Trail races have no ratified world records. There is no absolute benchmark for comparison, because each course is its own terrain problem: gradient, altitude, weather, surface. So the sporting quality of a race like Kaçkar can only be assessed through two things: course records and the depth of the elite field. The report provides neither. That is a deliberate gap in the political-sport-tourism genre, and I will not fill it with speculation.

What the report does provide is the organisational structure. Behind the race stands a coalition of the Ministry of Youth and Sports, the Türkiye Tourism Promotion and Development Agency, the Rize Governorship and DOKA — the Eastern Black Sea Development Agency. On the sponsorship side are Turkish Airlines, TOGG, Turkcell and Maxis. This is not the list of a local race. It is the list of a national campaign, where public money serves as the economic anchor and national-champion brands are mobilised as a communications platform.

Minister Bak states the goal plainly: to associate Ayder and Rize with a major event, much as Davos is associated with an economic forum. He also says sports tourism brings significant revenue to the country. Here I see a familiar structure: a country borrowing an international sports brand as a distribution channel for its tourism message. The race is only the vehicle; the destination is the product. I have seen this model in many places, from city marathons to rural cycling stages. The common thread is sport used as a language to talk about a place.

Core analysis: separating scale from quality

Looking at the figure of 2,000 athletes from 60 countries, I want to split it into two layers. The first is organisational capacity: to draw an international field of that size to an Eastern Black Sea mountain region, the organisers must meet UTMB's technical, safety and branding standards. This is a real upgrade of local capability. The second layer is sporting quality, and this layer has no data at all. These two layers are often merged into one in communications, and that is where I want to separate them.

I have followed hundreds of matches and drawn one principle: scale is not quality, and presence is not achievement. On that Russian night in 2026, Japan held 55% of possession against Belgium but touched the ball in the opponent's box only 7 times, versus 21 for their opponents. The possession figure looked good; the penetration figure looked bad. Reading only the first would lead to the wrong conclusion about the game. Kaçkar is the same: the figure of 2,000 is impressive, but it measures brand appeal, not course standard. I collect mistakes, classify them, and then I know where the team is heading. Here, the common mistake is reading the participation figure as proof of professional standing.

So which data in the report actually deserves attention? There is one small detail I consider the most important: news agency staff ran the 20 km course. This detail shows the event has multiple distances, a typical feature of UTMB-series races. But the report does not list the full distance menu. For an analyst, this is a grey area to track, because the distance menu and course profile are precisely what allow difficulty to be assessed. A 20 km mountain race and a 100 km traverse are two entirely different problems, and cannot be measured with the same ruler.

Another detail: the Race Director is Johan Essl, a UTMB official. His presence confirms this is an official franchise node of the UTMB brand, not a spontaneous local race. To me, this signals the operating model: UTMB Group expands its geographic footprint by licensing regional races, in exchange for an international athlete flow and accumulated data. The host country gains image and visitors; UTMB gains network. This is classic franchising logic applied to endurance sport.

I want to dwell on the sponsorship structure, because it says much about ambition. Turkish Airlines, TOGG, Turkcell, Maxis — these are leading national brands, spanning aviation, electric vehicles and telecommunications. When a trail race assembles a sponsorship roster like that, it is no longer purely a sporting event. It is a national communications product. Airline sponsorship usually comes with flight-route support for international visitors — a standard tourism-promotion playbook move. Public funding from DOKA and the ministry shows public money is the event's economic anchor. This is both a strength and a risk.

Economically, a race of 2,000 people is a considerable revenue machine. Each international athlete pays not only an entry fee but also for accommodation, food, transport and equipment. For a region like Ayder, whose local economy depends on tourism, this visitor flow has direct significance. This is why the provincial government and the regional development agency are willing to inject public money. They are not buying a race; they are buying a flow of visitors.

Sportingly, one thing stands out: the report names no elite Turkish athlete. If the goal were to build a national trail-running base, one would expect at least a few representative faces. This absence suggests the current focus is organisation and promotion, not yet talent development. This is a reasonable strategic choice in an early phase: build the stage first, build the actors later. But it also raises questions about long-term depth, because a race without a generation of elite domestic athletes will struggle to forge its own identity and will depend on international visitors.

I also want to place Kaçkar in Turkey's larger picture. The country is building a portfolio of international sports events, from volleyball to major tournaments, aiming towards the 2027 European Games in Istanbul. A trail race in a remote mountain region is not a flagship event, but it is a piece in the overall organisational capacity. Every successfully staged event is a demonstration of operational ability, a rehearsal for larger events. From that angle, Kaçkar is both a goal and an exercise.

A counter-intuitive angle: when pomp means emptiness

The counter-intuitive point here is not the figure of 2,000, but that the more the report brims with organisational detail, the emptier it is on the sporting side. People often assume that an event gathering 60 countries and a large sponsorship roster must have high professional quality. But the data does not confirm that. Not a single elite athlete is named. No finish times. No course records. The minister's claim that ultra-marathon runners are world-class athletes with followers worldwide is a rhetorical characterisation, not evidence of the depth of the specific field at this event.

Every probability conceals a shock — I only make sure it does not repeat. For Kaçkar, the shock has a precedent and has been recorded: the provincial government recalls that in the first season, Kaçkar was hidden by fog and rain. That is not a trivial detail. For an event whose core value is the scenery broadcast to the world, bad weather is a direct risk to its very promotional purpose. The Black Sea mountain climate is volatile, with rain and fog as defining features. A mountain race dependent on beautiful imagery can lose its communications value in a single cloudy morning.

There is another paradox I want to raise: the more commercially successful the race becomes, the more easily it is trapped in dependence on public budgets. When the economic anchor is money from the ministry, the regional development agency and the provincial government, the event's survival is tied to budget cycles and political cycles. This is the blind spot of the sport-tourism model: it creates image quickly but struggles to create independent sustainability. If the national funding flow stalls, a new race in only its second season will find it very hard to stand alone on amateur entry fees.

There is one data dimension the report does not touch, and I want to argue against myself before concluding. Suppose the organisers genuinely have a strong elite field. Then the absence of results in the press may be an issue of the news genre, not of the race itself. This is a real possibility, and I must leave it open. The evidence to confirm or deny it is simple: the start list and the results table. Until those two documents are published, any claim about Kaçkar's professional standing should be treated as marketing, not fact.

This leads me to an observation about the nature of this discipline. Ultra-trail running is a sport its fans follow with inspiration, not with tables. With no world records and no absolute benchmarks, spectators find comparison hard. That is precisely why its appeal is built on stories and scenery more than on results. Brands like UTMB understand this very well, and they sell experience, not just a race. Kaçkar is a product squarely in line with that logic.

From a Vietnamese perspective, I see a structural lesson here. A country can turn a remote mountain region into an international sports destination within a few years, if it borrows the right brand, attaches the right story and mobilises the right sponsorship coalition. But the accompanying lesson is equally clear: image cannot replace capability, and scale cannot replace quality. If only the opening ceremony is polished while the results are left blank, one is building a beautiful stage without a scoreboard.

Signals to watch

Kaçkar by UTMB is in its brand-building phase, in its second season, with a powerful public-private coalition and an international field impressive in number. The signal I will watch in the next round is not the number of countries, but three concrete things: the elite start list, the distance menu and course records, and the survival of the sponsorship flow through the third season. If those three signals appear, Kaçkar will move from a promotional campaign into a real race. If not, it remains a beautiful story about a mountain region — and beautiful stories, as I always say, need to be verified by data before they are believed.