Kaçkar by UTMB: 2,000 Athletes From 60 Countries, and the Void Nobody Wants to Name

On the Ayder plateau, the mist over the Kaçkar range had not yet lifted when the starting gun fired. No finish line was mentioned in the report. No winner's name. No finishing time. Just one round number: 2,000 athletes from 60 countries, and a government minister firing the starting signal for the second edition of Kaçkar by UTMB.

I read that report four times, and each time something felt missing. A mountain running event gathering two thousand people from sixty countries, and not one of them was named. An empty stadium still echoes, but sometimes that echo is drowned out by the loudspeakers of people who never ran.

Context: one mesh in the UTMB empire

To understand what is happening in Rize, you have to understand what UTMB is. Ultra-Trail du Mont-Blanc began as a race circling the Mont-Blanc massif in Chamonix, France, and over time became a global brand operating the so-called "UTMB World Series" — a network of satellite races across continents, each one a node leading to the finals in Chamonix.

Kaçkar by UTMB is one such node. This is the event's second edition, meaning it is still in a brand-building phase rather than an established fixture. One detail stands out: the presence of Race Director Johan Essl — a face from UTMB's central apparatus. That detail says this is not a spontaneous local race but an official franchise node within the UTMB system.

Another detail matters: agency officials ran the 20 km course. The figure of 20 km indicates the event offers multiple distance categories — typical of UTMB-series races — but the full distance menu is not stated. Short distances for officials, long distances for serious runners; that is how a mountain race serves two purposes at once: sport and public relations.

The terrain deserves a note. The Ayder plateau and the Kaçkar range sit at roughly 1,300 to over 2,000 metres. At that altitude, gradient and thin oxygen are physical variables acting directly on performance, yet the report provides no course elevation profile. Without a profile, nothing can be said about the true difficulty of the 20 km or any other category.

The entry mechanism: nothing like Olympic athletics

This is where I want to linger longest, because it is the blind spot of most readers who follow traditional sports.

Trail running has no performance time standard for entry. There is no "qualifying cut" like 2:10 for a men's marathon. Entry to UTMB works through lottery and "Running Stones" — points accumulated at qualifying races, used as lottery weights toward Chamonix. This is an economy running parallel to the World Athletics Olympic system, not a part of it.

The consequence is concrete: a race can gather two thousand people from sixty countries without needing a single champion. The draw is the lottery ticket, not the medal. And because trail running has no ratified world records — no WR to break — a race's sporting standing can only be measured by two things: course records and the depth of the elite field. The report provides neither.

Let me state it plainly: a sports event that publishes no results is an event selling images, not achievements.

Within the trail system there is another layer of rules that journalism usually skips: mandatory kit, cut-off times, GPS tracking devices. These are life-critical safety rules, especially in high mountain terrain. The minister mentioned that "all trails have cameras for taking and sharing photos," but that is a safety-cum-promotional feature, not a competition regulation. Not a single mandatory-equipment clause appears in the report.

Who pays, who benefits

The sponsorship structure here is worth dissecting. The report names Turkish Airlines, TOGG, Turkcell and Maxis — all major national brands. Alongside them sit the Ministry of Youth and Sports, the Türkiye Tourism Promotion and Development Agency, the Rize Governorship, and DOKA — the Eastern Black Sea Development Agency.

DOKA's involvement is the most important signal few will notice. A regional development agency does not pour money into a race out of love for sport. It does so because a race is soft infrastructure to pull visitors into an economically struggling region. Public money is acting as the event's economic anchor, meaning its survival depends more on political budgets than on ticket revenue.

Minister Osman Aşkın Bak states the goal plainly: sports tourism brings significant earnings to the country. He even compares the ambition of Rize and Ayder to Davos — a place synonymous with an economic forum. This is no longer a sports press conference; it is a presentation on territorial brand positioning, with running as the vehicle. Based on my years of tracking trail events, I see this model spreading among countries seeking destination positioning: borrowing an international sports brand as a distribution channel for tourism messaging.

The counterintuitive angle: strength from the weakest point

People assume a race is elevated by good athletes. Here the logic is inverted. Kaçkar by UTMB is not strong because of who it has, but because it is part of UTMB. The minister called UTMB "the largest organization in the world" in trail running, and he is right about brand power. The event's liquidity does not come from a cast of stars; it comes from a logo.

Thirty-eight dust-covered journal pages, and one refused interview, became a doorway — that is how I usually enter the stories of Kenyan female athletes. In Rize, the doorway is elsewhere: in the silence of the results sheet. When an organiser does not publish finishing times, it may be a communications oversight, or a deliberate choice — because a modest average number would deflate the far prettier "world-class athletes" narrative. In the global trail landscape, France, Italy, Spain and the United States remain powers with deep elite benches. Turkey is at the beginning of its brand-building chain, and there is nothing shameful in that — only in dressing it in the language of maturity.

The biggest risk is not doping, but weather

There is no signal of doping, cheating or eligibility dispute in the report. Those risks barely feature in a mass-participation trail race. But there is another risk named by the Rize governorship itself: in the first edition, fog and rain hid Kaçkar.

For a mountain race in the Black Sea climate, weather is a survival variable. It threatens not only athlete safety but the event's very promotional purpose. A race designed to produce beautiful footage and spread images of a region loses all value when clouds blanket the course. In other words, the business model depends on a variable nobody controls. Worst case is a cancelled course; the middle case is a rerouted course and the loss of the most beautiful frames — the very frames sponsors pay for.

What is changing

One positive fact cannot be denied: two thousand people spent money and time travelling from sixty countries to a plateau in eastern Turkey to run uphill. Nobody forced them. That signals geography is becoming less important than brand in this sport, and a country can position itself as a trail destination within a few years — far faster than training a generation of world-class athletes to win medals.

One milestone is worth placing alongside: Turkey will host the 2027 European Games in Istanbul. A trail race on the eastern frontier is not a standalone game; it is a link in a chain testing national delivery capacity. An athlete's value is not in the transfer figure, but in whose fate that figure changes — and an event's value, likewise, lies in the fate it changes for a place, not in the attendance number printed on a press release.

Every time they tell me numbers are proof, I remember Oshoala's eyes in Rio — refusal is also a form of love. Here, the refusal lies elsewhere: in nobody being willing to publish finishing times. The question I leave behind: when a race succeeds before it has a winner, whose success is it serving — or is it serving only those who never set off?