Kaçkar by UTMB, Second Edition: 2,000 Runners, 60 Countries and a Void of Performance Data

The fog over Ayder does not lift. It only changes colour — from the milky white of early morning to the leaden grey of afternoon — then settles into a thin sheet hanging in front of the Kaçkar range, hiding precisely the thing the whole race wants to sell to the world: the mountain.

On the opening day of the second edition of Kaçkar by UTMB, the organisers offered two verifiable numbers: 2,000 runners, from 60 countries. Turkey's Minister of Youth and Sports, Osman Aşkın Bak, fired the starting signal and then ran the 20-kilometre course with a group of officials and journalists. In everything released to the press, there is no winner's name, no finishing time, no course record, no split data, no athlete named alongside a result.

That is a paradox worth pausing on. A sports event gathering two thousand people from sixty nations, covered by state media, backed by national champion brands, and carrying not one line of data about who ran fastest.

I have spent years crawling through data tables to find the fastest runners in places nobody bothers to record. This time the question runs the other way: what allows a mountain race to exist, grow, and become a national priority without performance?

Context: a node inside the UTMB ecosystem

UTMB — Ultra-Trail du Mont-Blanc — began in 2026 as a loop around the Mont-Blanc massif, starting and finishing in Chamonix, France, crossing French, Italian and Swiss territory. The main distance runs roughly 171 km with more than 10,000 m of cumulative elevation. Over two decades it has turned from an adventure for a few hundred people into a global brand operating on a near-franchise model: a UTMB World Series of satellite races across continents, all feeding the Chamonix finals in late August.

The entry mechanism is entirely unlike road athletics. There is no time standard. There is no national quota based on performance. To reach the Chamonix final, runners accumulate Running Stones — points earned at races in the system — and enter a lottery. UTMB sells opportunity, not selections based on performance level.

Kaçkar by UTMB is a node in that system. It sits in Turkey's Eastern Black Sea region, around the Kaçkar range and the Ayder plateau in Rize province. This is the second edition. The organisers point to the presence of Race Director Johan Essl, a figure from UTMB's central machinery, as evidence this is not an independent local race but an official unit within the chain.

The Turkish backing includes the Ministry of Youth and Sports, the Türkiye Tourism Promotion and Development Agency, the Rize Governorship and DOKA, the Eastern Black Sea Development Agency. Sponsors include Turkish Airlines, TOGG, Turkcell and Maxis.

Read that list the way an archaeologist would, and the most important thing is immediately visible: this is not a federation event. It is an alliance between a global private sports brand and a set of state institutions. Their partners are not an Olympic committee, but a regional development agency and a national airline.

The 20 km course the officials ran confirms one thing indirectly: the event runs multiple distances at once, typical of UTMB-series races. But the full distance menu is not published. There is no course profile, no cut-off detail, no mandatory-kit list. A mountain race at an estimated 1,300 to over 2,000 metres, on Kaçkar terrain, and the reader cannot know how hard the course is.

The core: decoding a sports-tourism machine

This is where clear thinking matters. Judge Kaçkar by athletics standards and it looks worthless: no mark, no result, nothing to compare against any benchmark. Trail running has no ratified world records, so performance only means something relative to a specific course — and even that is absent.

Judge it by industry standards and the picture flips. Kaçkar does not sell performance. It sells place.

Look at the cost structure. A mountain race needs no stadium, no grandstand, no floodlights, no manicured pitch. The infrastructure it needs already exists: mountains, fog, trails, villages. The only investment is safety logistics, aid stations, medical cover, rescue and a tracking system good enough that nobody goes missing. Compared with building an arena, that is a remarkably cheap price for an event with international media reach.

The minister notes that all the trails have cameras for taking and sharing photographs. It sounds like a minor technical detail. It is actually a product statement. Cameras serve two purposes at once: safety monitoring and image production. For a race selling scenery, the image is the merchandise.

The Rize Governor recalls that last year Kaçkar was hidden by fog and rain. Many readers skim past this, yet it is the key to the entire model. If your product is landscape, weather is your number one operational risk. Not doping. Not refereeing disputes. Cloud.

Who pays, and what they buy

The presence of DOKA is the clearest signal. This is a regional public financing body. When a regional development agency funds a sports event, the money is not a pure sports budget line; it sits in regional economic development. Kaçkar is accounted for as an economic development project, not a competition.

This is not a new model. France did it with Chamonix, Italy with the Dolomites, Spain with the Pyrenees, the United States with Utah and Colorado. What is new is that it has been packaged into a development doctrine with a name: sports tourism.

The Davos analogy

The most revealing line from Turkish officials is the comparison with Davos. The minister says they want to associate Ayder and Rize with organisations like this, the way Davos is associated with economic forums.

That is a brand strategy statement. Davos is not famous because its mountains are prettier. It is famous because it became the default name for a type of event.

Who holds the power

Global trail running is close to a single-brand hegemony. UTMB is not merely a race; it is a satellite system, a technical standard, an entry mechanism. A race that wants 2,000 runners from 60 countries can hardly achieve it standing alone. That number comes from attaching to a system that already has a customer base.

In pure sporting terms, this is a conscious trade-off. You do not build a national trail-running base by importing a brand. You build a destination. Those two things are very far apart.

Why 60 countries matters more than a winner

There is a question I always ask before any event with politicians present: which numbers do they choose to cite, and which do they choose to omit?

At Kaçkar, the cited numbers are 2,000 runners and 60 countries. The omitted numbers are finishing times, drop-out rates, temperature, humidity, injuries.

That choice is not random. The first two measure international reach. That is a tourism-industry metric, not a sports metric. For a tourism sponsor, 60 countries is the prettiest number on the report. For a national team coach, it is worthless: he needs five people under six hours, not 2,000 people of any description.

Kaçkar is in year two. It is in a brand-building phase. That is not bad. It only means its sporting quality cannot yet be assessed by any measure.

Turkey's position and the shadow of Chamonix

Global trail running can be divided into four tiers. The top is UTMB Mont-Blanc in Chamonix. The second is the UTMB World Series satellites, including Kaçkar. The third is independent national trail races with domestic prestige but no international brand. The bottom is local races, effectively invisible internationally.

Turkey is trying to jump to tier two. That is a reasonable strategic move. The question is the motive behind it: to build a national trail-running base, or to own a trail-running destination?

The facts suggest the second. No Turkish trail runner is named. There is no information on where domestic athletes sit in the system. The narrative centres on place-making: the Davos comparison, international visitor numbers, broadcast imagery, sports-tourism earnings.

This is a legitimate strategy. It has one inherent weakness: it depends on a foreign brand, and if that brand leaves or changes strategy, things can collapse quickly. Nobody blames Chamonix, because Chamonix owns the brand. A branch office does not.

The contrarian angle: when a country buys a name instead of building a base

Intuition says that if a country invests public money in sport, it is building its sporting base. Kaçkar looks like such an investment: ministry, governorship, development agency, national airline, national EV brand, national telecoms. The full state line-up is on the field.

But look closely at the final product. The final product is not a generation of Turkish trail runners. It is an image: the Ayder plateau, the Kaçkar range, the Turkish flag, an international field running a mountain trail.

There is nothing wrong with that product. It sells. But it is not an academy. A sports destination and a sports base are two different things, and being good at the first does not indicate the second is improving.

The presence of UTMB Race Director Johan Essl makes this explicit. The organiser did not just license a name. It leased an operating system. That is good news for runners and less welcome news for ambitions of autonomy.

There are three reasons the absence of performance data is a problem rather than a detail. First, without data no competitor can be assessed. An event with 2,000 entrants and no results is like a football match with a crowd and no score. Second, without data there is no way to track year-on-year progression. The second edition cannot be compared with the first on any axis other than scale. Third, the absence of data usually accompanies a specific incentive structure: where performance is not the main product, recording performance becomes secondary.

The minister's claim that ultra-marathon runners are world-class athletes with global followings is true at the general level and unverifiable at the specific level. It is a common type of statement: assigning a category's characteristics to a particular case.

I once made the opposite mistake. In August 2026, in Yangon, I was the only young reporter from a Manila digital sports outlet sent to the AFF U19 Championship. In the Philippines–Thailand match I noticed a 16-year-old midfielder left on the bench until the 60th minute. I built my own tracking sheet for running and ball-reception positions, and saw superior positioning despite raw technique. I wrote a 5,000-word piece with data charts. Many called it delusional. A Japanese club scout asked to buy the full report.

The lesson was not that I was right. It was that I had data to be wrong with. Without that tracking sheet, my judgement would have been a feeling — immune to being proven wrong or right.

If I had to pick one factor that could bring this whole model down, it would be weather. This is not speculation. The Rize Governor has stated that last year Kaçkar was hidden by fog and rain. That is an accidental confession of the core risk.

The second major risk is dependence on public money. The presence of the ministry, tourism agency, governorship and DOKA shows most resources come from the public sector. The event's survival depends on budget cycles and political priorities.

Takeaway

Southeast Asia is not outside this story. Our region has a fast-growing trail-running scene, with mountain races in Vietnam, Thailand, Indonesia, the Philippines and Malaysia drawing ever more international runners. Most operate on a private or semi-private model, organised by sports companies or running communities rather than state institutions.

That difference matters. The Southeast Asian model runs on community and market. The Kaçkar model runs on the state and an international brand. Both have strengths and weaknesses.

The question for Southeast Asian organisers is not which model to choose. It is: when our races grow, do we keep the data?

My shovel is data, and xG is a measure that never lies. In trail running there is no xG, but there are equivalents: checkpoint times, cumulative elevation, drop-out rates, pace distribution by terrain. If nobody records them, those metrics vanish. And when they vanish, the race's history vanishes with them.

The fog over Ayder still has not lifted. Two thousand people ran through it. Sixty countries were present. And when the last of the fog withdraws, what remains on the Kaçkar summit will not be a record. It will be a beautiful photograph.

The question for the organisers is whether that photograph is enough to sustain a race for ten more seasons. And the question for those of us building races in Southeast Asia is whether we want a beautiful photograph, or a results list long enough for those who come after us to read.