Kaçkar by UTMB: When a Mountain Trail Becomes a Destination Brand

The fog over Ayder last season was so thick that the Kaçkar range vanished from every frame. People recall it as a regret, not a technical failure. For a race built to showcase a landscape, whether the mountain deigns to appear matters more than who crosses the line first.

I lingered on that detail. Nearly thirty years spent lurking on running courses, I am used to people asking each other's times before asking each other's names. At Kaçkar by UTMB, in its second edition, that question has almost no place to stand.

Two thousand runners. Sixty countries. These are the only facts concrete enough to hold onto. No winner, no times, no course record, no segment breakdown. Turkey's Minister of Youth and Sports, Osman Aşkın Bak, personally fired the starting signal. Johan Essl, race director of the UTMB World Series, was present on the Ayder plateau. Behind them stands a sponsor coalition of national brands: Turkish Airlines, the electric vehicle maker TOGG, Turkcell, Maxis. Further back lies public money: the Ministry of Youth and Sports, the Eastern Black Sea Development Agency, and the Rize provincial administration.

Reading that, I understood I was holding a different kind of article from the ones I usually write.

UTMB, the Ultra-Trail du Mont-Blanc, is not a single race. It is a brand, headquartered in Chamonix, France, operating a circuit of satellite events under the World Series name across continents. To reach the finals in Mont-Blanc, runners need no time standard. They accumulate "Running Stones" — points earned at satellite races — and use that number as a weight in a lottery.

That mechanism says a great deal. A race selects people by probability, not by performance. And for the lottery to retain its value, the system must keep opening new satellites. Each satellite is a mesh in the net, and each mesh must be alluring enough that runners worldwide agree to fly there. That is why an obscure plateau in the Eastern Black Sea can become a stop on two thousand people's itineraries.

Kaçkar by UTMB is one such satellite, now in its second season, set in Ayder, in the Kaçkar range of Rize province. The altitude here runs from roughly 1,300 to over 2,000 metres. The Black Sea's humid climate combined with steep terrain creates a physical puzzle entirely different from road running.

That should have been good material for analysis. But across everything published, I found no elevation profile, no total climb figure, no full distance menu. The only clearly confirmed distance is twenty kilometres — and it surfaced not because anyone set a mark there, but because two Anadolu Agency journalists, Yusuf Özhan and Hasan Hüseyin Kul, signed up to run it.

That detail made me laugh to myself. At an event where two thousand people from sixty countries start together, the only distance named outright is the one the media ran themselves.

If this were a track meet, I could say a great deal. A hundred-metre race offers hundreds of comparison points: winning time, personal best, season's best, wind speed, reaction time, every hundredth of a second. Mountain trail running has no world records. That is not an oversight by the organisers; it is the nature of the discipline. Every course is its own entity, with its own gradient, surface, climate and altitude. So the only true measure of sporting quality can be course records and the depth of the elite field.

Both were absent from the report.

A record is only a shadow; the person is the track. But when the shadow disappears, people are forced to look elsewhere — and elsewhere here turns out to be an economic machine.

The structure deserves scrutiny. A sports event with four tiers of force behind it: a government ministry, a regional development agency, a provincial administration, and a slate of national-brand sponsors. The minister calls this sports tourism and states plainly that it generates significant earnings for the country. He compares the ambitions of Rize and Ayder to Davos — attaching a place name to a type of event, the way Davos is attached to an economic forum.

That is a line worth recording. It shows Kaçkar by UTMB's objective does not lie in medals. It lies in image. And when the objective is image, the biggest rival is not the fastest runner. The rival is the weather.

Rize officials recall that in the first edition, fog and rain hid the Kaçkar range. For a race selling scenery, a rainy day does not stop at inconvenience; it is lost revenue. The finest frames, the footage shipped to international media, all depend on whether the mountain agrees to appear. The greatest operational risk for a mountain event in the Black Sea region is not injury, not doping, not cheating. It is cloud.

I say this not to belittle the race. I say it because it is the first thing someone in my trade must recognise: some events treat performance as a means, while the real product sits elsewhere.

So what is the real product?

Two thousand people from sixty countries, carrying money, carrying photographs, carrying stories. Airlines selling extra seats. Hotels in Ayder booked out. A regional development agency pouring public funds to turn a little-known plateau into a named destination on the international trail-running map. A UTMB satellite adding one more mesh to its global lottery system. And somewhere in that chain lies a long-term pipeline: a country rehearsing its capacity to host international events, aiming at larger ones in the years ahead.

In that chain, the champion is the least-mentioned figure.

This makes me think of the courses I have followed on foot. In 2026, I skipped the awards ceremony at a marathon in Da Nang to trail a twenty-three-year-old trail runner named Lê Văn Tuấn all the way back to Lien Chieu district. He finished ninth, without a medal. But he kept a training diary of more than 1,800 pages, written over five years, and he ran on sand in shoes with worn-out soles. The piece about him was shared more than 12,000 times. The following year, he won the national title.

I retell that not to compare two sporting cultures. I retell it because it reminds me that the worth of a course lies not in the size of the grandstand, but in whether it is willing to tell the human story.

At Kaçkar by UTMB this season, the organisers held two thousand human beings in their hands. They chose to tell the number.

Athletics and human life share one thing: everyone has a finish line, but few run the right route. Perhaps that is why I do not resent the Turkish approach. They are running their own route — the route of a nation using sport to position itself on the map. It is just that this route does not pass through the results sheet.

One detail I kept for the end. The minister said ultramarathon runners are world-class athletes with followers everywhere. That is true in general terms, but unverifiable for this specific event. Not one elite name was named. Not one mark was cited.

I do not blame the organisers. An opening report has the right to avoid results, because results do not yet exist. But to a sports reader, that gap remains a gap. It reminds me there are two kinds of sporting events: those staged to find the fastest person, and those staged so people remember a place. Both are legitimate. They simply answer two different questions.

There are runners who never reach the finish, yet keep running forever in my memory. At Kaçkar, whoever finishes first will be mentioned in a short report, then disappear. The mountain stays. If the fog returns next season, if one season the public money stops flowing, where will those two thousand people run?

That is the question I carried home from Ayder. It may take several more seasons to answer. But I know one thing for certain: a course only truly lives when people remember the one who ran it, not the photograph of the mountain behind.