Kaçkar by UTMB: 2,000 Runners, 60 Countries, and the Silence After the Starting Gun

The fog of the first season

Last year, the fog and rain closed over the Kaçkar range at exactly the moment the race was held. At the opening ceremony of the second edition, the Governor of Rize recalled that day the way a man recalls a bad memory of his own: the mountain the whole province wanted to place on the world map chose to disappear from every frame.

This season, the organisers answered with a bigger start line. Around 2,000 runners from 60 countries gathered in Turkey's Eastern Black Sea region. Osman Aşkın Bak, Minister of Youth and Sports, gave the start. Among those racing the 20-kilometre course, the Anadolu Ajansı report recorded two names belonging to the agency itself: Yusuf Özhan and Hasan Hüseyin Kul.

And the first finisher? Not named. No time, no course record, no split analysis at any distance.

That silence is where I want to begin.

A system that does not run on time standards

UTMB stands for Ultra-Trail du Mont-Blanc, a trail race born in Chamonix, France, in 2026, when a small group of runners decided to circle the Mont-Blanc massif in a single night. Two decades later, that name has expanded into the UTMB World Series: a network of satellite races across many countries, all feeding into the finals in Chamonix.

The first thing to understand about this system is that it does not operate on time standards. Trail running has no recognised world records, because every course differs in length, gradient, altitude and surface, and every season's weather differs too. Runners here do not clear a performance threshold to earn a place in the final. They accumulate “Running Stones” — a form of credit earned at qualifying races, used as a weight in the entry lottery.

Put differently, the door to Chamonix opens according to how many times you have travelled to run somewhere far away, not according to how many seconds faster you have run. A structure like that pushes value toward experience, travel and accumulation, while blurring the thing sports journalism usually clings to: individual performance.

Kaçkar by UTMB is the second edition of the race, set in the Kaçkar mountains of Rize province, centred on the Ayder plateau at roughly 1,300 to over 2,000 metres. This is high mountain terrain with the damp climate characteristic of the Eastern Black Sea belt, where rain and fog are everyday events rather than exceptions.

Behind the event stands a fairly clear coalition: the Ministry of Youth and Sports, the Türkiye Tourism Promotion and Development Agency (TGA), the Rize Governorship and DOKA — the Eastern Black Sea Development Agency. At sponsorship level, the list includes Turkish Airlines, TOGG, Turkcell and Maxis. The race director is Johan Essl, an official within the UTMB system.

That is the structure of an event with a state, a flag carrier, a national electric vehicle maker and a major telecoms group behind it. What is missing from the report: a results sheet.

Who pays, who gets named

The presence of DOKA deserves more than a passing line. It is a regional development agency, which means public money is being used as the economic anchor of the event, alongside corporate sponsorship. A mountain race in Rize is therefore not purely a sporting matter; it is an infrastructure investment expected to return value in image and visitor numbers.

That explains why the most carefully built infrastructure at Kaçkar is visitor infrastructure rather than results infrastructure. An official at the opening ceremony said the images broadcast from here “will be very beautiful,” and that cameras are installed on all the trails for taking and sharing photographs. Cameras on the trails serve two purposes at once: safety monitoring for runners, and the production of promotional material.

Minister Bak said ultra marathon runners are world-class athletes with followers around the globe. That is true in general terms. But in a report about a race with 2,000 participants, not a single professional runner is named. The names that appear are officials, sponsors, the race director and two sports journalists from the news agency. The framework being retold is the framework of power.

For someone who writes athletes' biographies for a living, this is a familiar kind of report: a real event, a real scale, but the people inside it replaced by the organising committee. Over the years I have learned to read reports like this in order to find the part that was edited out — usually the most interesting part.

A Davos of the trails?

The most telling remark of the opening ceremony came from the organising side: they want to associate Ayder and Rize with events of international standing, the way Davos is associated with economic forums. That sentence states the strategy more clearly than any results table could: the goal is not to produce athletes but to produce a place name.

In the same vein, another statement stressed that sports tourism brings significant earnings to the country. That is entirely rational economics, and many countries are following the same road: licensing or inviting an international sports brand into their region, then using that brand's prestige to sell scenery, climate and culture.

In that model, the product on sale is the image. So when fog closes over Kaçkar as it did in the first season, the damage is not to performance. It is to the photo archive.

And here a small paradox appears that anyone who follows mountain racing will recognise: the very things that make the discipline compelling — harsh weather, hard terrain, shifting landscapes — are also the things most likely to ruin its media product. A race in Ayder is at its most beautiful when the clouds break. It is also at its most fragile when they do not.

What is known, and what is left blank

Gathering the verifiable facts from the report, the picture is compact. The race is in its second edition. Around 2,000 runners came from 60 countries. One 20-kilometre distance is confirmed, because the officials ran exactly that course. The race director belongs to the UTMB system. There is an organising coalition of a ministry, a tourism agency, a provincial authority and a regional development agency. There are four major sponsors at national level.

The list of what does not appear is longer: no full distance menu, no total elevation, no finish rate, no share of women entrants, no leader's time, no course record, no season standings. For a race already past its first edition, the absence of that entire cluster of data means nobody — not a reporter, not a fan — has enough ground to compare any runner with any other.

The core difference between commercial trail running and federation athletics lies here: on a mountain course, the memory of performance belongs to no one, unless the organising brand chooses to publish it. In track and road athletics, a result is entered into a federation system and exists independently of the meeting. In a commercial trail series, a result exists for as long as it is mentioned in that race's own marketing.

This is what I call information gain when I sit down to write: if readers only see the official report, they will know how many countries took part, but not who ran fastest. There are races whose results are never recorded, because people choose to forget.

The woman with no name in the report

Among 2,000 runners from 60 countries, there are certainly many women. The report names none of them.

I need no inference to say this; I only need to reread the text. But I also do not want to turn that absence into an indictment, because the problem is structural rather than the fault of one particular editor. The report was written in the political-sports news genre, where the protagonist is the person speaking, and in that genre women athletes have no place to begin with.

I write to recover the names that history has edited out of the results list.

Based on my experience following UTMB World Series live streams across several seasons, I notice a fairly durable rule: the preamble always spends a large share of its time on scenery, sponsors and overcoming-yourself stories, while split data for the leading women's group tends to arrive later, or as a line of text crawling along the edge of the screen. That delay does not come from a conspiracy. It follows from how resources are allocated: where nobody pays for the data, the data is not collected.

A mountain race is a mirror held up to the way we tell the stories of women athletes on the trails. When I sat down to write Brandi Chastain's biography during the pandemic months, I had to delete three hundred pages of an early draft because I was writing about an icon rather than a person. The biography fell apart mid-pandemic, but the story was never cancelled. I learned that the most writable part of a woman athlete's life usually lies where nobody keeps count: sessions with no spectators, contracts never signed, seasons cut in half.

At Kaçkar, the part nobody keeps count of is the entire competition.

Risk sits at cloud level

If I had to rank the risks of this event, weather would come first. The Governor of Rize supplied the evidence himself: in the first season, fog and rain closed over the range. In the Eastern Black Sea belt, that is typical climate, not a freak accident. For a mountain race, bad weather triggers a chain of consequences: shortened courses, cancellation, stricter mandatory-kit requirements, higher medical and rescue costs, and — most importantly for organisers — no beautiful imagery to broadcast.

The second risk is structural: dependence on public budgets. When the economic anchor of an event is state money and regional development funding, its continuity is tied to budget cycles and political will more than to the needs of the running community. A third edition does not automatically mean a fifth.

The third risk is how thin the competitive evidence is. A race in its second year is still building its brand; if results sheets, elite start lists and split data are not published, it will struggle to be treated by specialists as a landmark, however much participation grows.

The political backdrop also deserves noting: the presence of governing-party leadership in the region, references to the national women's volleyball team's successes, and references to the 2027 European Games to be hosted in Istanbul. Those details suggest Kaçkar sits inside a longer pipeline: building hosting capacity, building image, building the habit of staging international events.

The counter-intuitive angle: commercial value arrives before competitive proof

In most sports, money follows performance: run fast and you get sponsored, broadcast, paid. In the commercial trail series, that flow reverses. Sponsorship and public budgets arrive first, and may never need competitive proof to sustain themselves. A race can reach the commercialisation level of a national-scale event — airline, carmaker, telecoms group — while remaining entirely invisible as a competition.

That makes the familiar comparison meaningless. We usually ask: is this race strong, is it worth watching. At Kaçkar the right question is: what is this race selling. And the answer, looking at the sponsorship structure, is fairly clear: it is selling a region.

The blind spot is that whoever owns the archive writes the history. If competitive results are stored nowhere outside the race's own media channels, the memory of the discipline becomes a marketing asset that can be expanded or shrunk according to campaign. For a fast-growing sport with no independent record-keeping system, that gap is more worrying than any argument about records.

What remains after the finish line

If a third edition happens, we will most likely read the number of countries again before we read the number of seconds. That order is now established, and it serves well those who need a promotional story. But a discipline only matures when people remember the names of those who ran, rather than only the names of those who spoke.

I still want to know the name of the first woman to finish in Ayder, and how long it took her. Can a race become the symbol of a region without remembering the name of a single person who ran on it?