Kaçkar by UTMB Second Edition: 2,000 Runners, 60 Countries, and a Results Gap

In Ayder, when Osman Aşkın Bak gave the start, behind him stood 2,000 runners from 60 countries. This was the second edition of Kaçkar by UTMB in Rize, in Turkey’s Black Sea region. A mountain trail event with international scale, an opening ceremony led by the sports minister, a sponsorship list made up of national brands. But when I looked for results — the winner’s name, finish times, splits, course records — all of it was absent. The report said a great deal about the event and very little about the race.

According to Anadolu Ajansı, Turkey’s Minister of Youth and Sports Osman Aşkın Bak started Kaçkar by UTMB. The report confirmed a field of 2,000 athletes from 60 countries, confirmed that this was the second edition, confirmed a 20-kilometer course that officials ran, and confirmed the presence of Race Director Johan Essl. Those facts are enough to construct an international sports event. They are not enough to construct a race that can be assessed through performance. That gap is where this article begins.

UTMB World Series operates as a franchise-like brand system in trail running. At the center is UTMB Mont-Blanc in Chamonix, France, where satellite races send runners through a lottery and Running Stones system. An event like Kaçkar by UTMB does not select runners through time standards the way track and road athletics does. It opens entry through registration, race places, and accumulated points. That mechanism explains how a trail race in Rize can draw 2,000 people from 60 countries while the competitive results list never appears in the report.

Trail running has no ratified world records in the way marathon or 100 meters does. Every course is its own entity: gradient, altitude, surface, weather, aid stations. The measures of trail performance are course records and the depth of the elite field. The Anadolu Ajansı report provides neither. No champion’s name, no finish time, no splits, no record. An event with 2,000 runners but not a single time marker for comparison cannot yet be judged in the language of competitive sport.

Kaçkar by UTMB sits in the Kaçkar mountains, near the Ayder plateau in Rize province. The terrain has significant altitude, and the Black Sea climate is humid and quick to change. The report mentions a 20-kilometer course but does not list the full distance menu. A UTMB-series event usually offers several distances, from short to ultra, to serve different groups of runners. Confirming only 20 kilometers suggests the report cared more about the opening ceremony than the structure of the race. For a reader trying to understand the event, that is a major shortfall.

The value Kaçkar by UTMB created in its second edition was primarily destination-distribution value, not performance value. 2,000 athletes from 60 countries is a strong brand-distribution indicator. It shows that UTMB can pull people from many places to a mountain region of Turkey. It does not show how fast those people ran, who they were, who won, or who broke a record. A tourism fair can draw a crowd. A sports event gains competitive meaning only when there are results.

The presence of major sponsors is a clear signal of the event’s nature. Turkish Airlines, TOGG, Turkcell and Maxis are national brands. The backing institutions include the Ministry of Youth and Sports, the Türkiye Tourism Promotion and Development Agency, the Rize Governorship and DOKA, the Eastern Black Sea Development Agency. A trail event with a minister starting the race, a national airline, a national electric vehicle brand, a major telecoms operator and a regional development fund is a state-corporate coalition, not a weekend running club.

DOKA is a telling detail. A regional development agency’s involvement means public money is being used as the event’s economic anchor. A trail race can survive on entry fees and sponsorship. A trail race backed by a regional development fund is being viewed as a tool for local economic development. That view is not wrong. It is simply different from the view of a championship. When the goal is to attract visitors, build an image and sell hotel rooms, athlete performance is a means, not the end.

Minister Osman Aşkın Bak spoke of sports tourism as a significant source of revenue. He also described ultra marathon runners as world-class athletes with followers around the world. That statement is a positioning device. It did not come with the name of a single athlete. An event may have world-class runners, but if the report names none and gives no performances, the public has no way to verify the claim. Sports journalism lives on names and times. Without those two things, the event is only scenery.

The scenery is not small. Ayder and Rize have mountains, mist and beautiful routes. The report mentions images broadcast from the event, and a local official said the images sent from there would be very beautiful. That is destination-marketing logic. A beautiful frame can sell more than a results list. But sport has another property: it needs competitive memory. People remember a sprint, an overtake, a fall and a comeback. They do not remember a stream of runners passing through mist if nobody in that stream is named.

When I looked for a women’s start list, the gap was even clearer. The report did not name a single female athlete. No women’s champion, no women’s time, no women’s splits. An event with 2,000 people certainly includes women. But in the story being told, they do not appear. This is a familiar blind spot in women’s sports coverage: presence is acknowledged, performance is skipped. She does not need a medal to prove she won, but she needs to be named so others know how she ran.

Based on my experience covering trail and women’s athletics, a report without results usually hides one of two possibilities. The first: the event does not yet have a strong enough elite field, so there is nothing to show. The second: the organizers have results but did not put them in the press release because the communication focus is tourism. Both possibilities lead to the same outcome: fans have no data to follow, athletes have no platform to be remembered, and the event accumulates no competitive credibility year after year.

I once followed a Vietnamese weightlifter at the Tokyo 2026 Olympics. She failed on her final clean and jerk but still reached a personal best of 112 kg. That number was not a medal. It was evidence of eight years of training. My article was remembered because it had a concrete marker to hold on to. A trail event with no markers is harder to remember in that way. I write biographies, but in truth I am preserving the matches nobody scored. In trail running, the goals are the splits nobody publishes.

The biggest operational risk for Kaçkar by UTMB is weather. The Governor of Rize recalled that in the first edition, the Kaçkar mountains were hidden by fog and rain. That is a beautiful memory for tourism but a warning for sport. A mountain race can be cancelled, shortened or stopped mid-course by thick fog. When image is the main product, bad weather hits the product directly. When performance is the main product, bad weather can still produce a story. The two models carry different risks.

UTMB does not simply sell a race entry. It sells access to an ecosystem of symbols. Running a UTMB-series race means a chance to collect Running Stones, a chance to reach Chamonix, a sense of belonging to a global community. That is why a satellite race in Rize can draw people from 60 countries despite a short history. The UTMB brand does much of the distribution work. The host region does the logistics and imagery. The runners do the running. The report does the storytelling. The competitive results are the part left blank.

Turkey is using sport to position a destination. The minister compared Rize and Ayder to Davos, the town associated with the World Economic Forum. He wants Ayder and Rize to be associated with organizations of similar stature. That is a strategy of localizing an international brand. A mountain region once known for eco-tourism can become known for trail running. The approach has logic. It also raises a question: when a place builds its brand through an event, what remains after the event leaves?

The answer lies in organizational capacity. To carry the UTMB name, a race must meet UTMB’s technical, safety and branding standards. That means the local organizing committee must upgrade from a mass-participation race to an international event operator. It needs marked courses, aid stations, rescue teams, GPS tracking, mandatory-kit rules and evacuation plans. Those things do not appear in the report, but they are the submerged part of a trail event. If that part is strong, the race can last. If not, the UTMB brand becomes pressure rather than support.

In 2027, Istanbul will host the European Games. Turkey is building international event-delivery capacity across several layers: trail races, championships, multi-sport events. Kaçkar by UTMB may be one node in that chain. It does not directly produce track-and-field athletes, but it produces operating, media and logistics experience. Seen that way, the event has industrial value. Seen through performance, it is still in a foundation-building phase, in its second edition, with no elite data.

For Vietnamese readers, Kaçkar by UTMB is a lesson in how a region can use trail running to tell its own story. Trail races in Vietnam are also emerging in Sa Pa, Da Lat, Ha Giang and Ninh Binh, places with strong terrain and scenery. The lesson from Rize is that beautiful scenery, visitors and sponsorship are not enough to create a race people remember. A decent results list is also needed, an elite start list, a course record, a story about the winner. Those are the backbone of sport.

The contrarian point is here: a trail event can be a spectacular tourism success and still be poor in sporting substance. The two measures do not exclude each other, but they do not automatically move together. If organizers measure only visitor numbers, room nights and press clips, they will optimize for visitors, rooms and clips. If they measure finish times, they will optimize for the course, the athletes and officiating. An event can look beautiful in photographs and remain blurry in results. Sports fans need to know which one they are watching.

Confusing commercial value with competitive value is a weakness of many new sports events. An event is called successful when it draws a crowd, attracts sponsors and generates coverage. But that success does not automatically create a generation of athletes. It does not automatically create a culture of following the sport. A following requires names, times, comparisons and arguments. An event that does not publish results is like a football match that does not publish the score. Fans can enter the stadium, but they have nothing to remember.

Women’s sport does not need to be saved; it needs to be recognized. That applies to trail running. A woman running 100 kilometers in the mountains does not need pity. She needs a results list with her name, a timeline, an interview, a frame that is not merely background for scenery. Women’s sports coverage often falls into two poles: celebrating presence or staying silent on performance. Neither helps readers understand what she did. An event with 2,000 people is a good chance to correct that blind spot. The chance was left empty in the opening report.

The second risk is dependence on public money. An event backed by the Ministry of Youth and Sports, the Rize governorship, DOKA and the tourism agency can grow quickly. It can also stall if the budget line changes. Events that live on corporate sponsorship have a different development rhythm from events that live on regional development budgets. When assessing Kaçkar by UTMB’s durability, look at the revenue structure, not only the number of runners. An event with 2,000 runners can still be fragile if those 2,000 entries do not sustain the organizing machine.

The third risk is the gap between claim and evidence. The minister called ultra marathon runners world-class. The report named none. Such a claim may be true for a few individuals in the field, but the public cannot verify it. In sport, credibility is built through repeated results. An event that wants to be seen as an elite stage must publish a start list, results, splits and records. Without those, the claim is marketing. Marketing is not bad. It just cannot replace a results list.

What to watch in the third edition is the start list and the results. If the event publishes winners’ names, times for each distance, course records and elite-field depth, the debate will shift from scale to quality. If it continues to publish only the number of runners and countries, it remains a sports-tourism product. Both directions can succeed. The question is which measure the organizers choose, and whether the media has the courage to ask for it.

Another signal is the distance structure. The report confirms 20 kilometers but does not say what other distances exist. If the event has ultra, half marathon, marathon, 20 km and 10 km, it serves multiple running groups. The difficulty of the event lies in the longest distance, not the shortest. A 20-kilometer race can draw a crowd, but it does not represent the whole event. Readers need to know which distance is the centerpiece, which distance has elite runners and which distance has records. The report does not answer those questions.

Weather remains the biggest variable. The Black Sea region has heavy rain, thick fog and rapid temperature changes. A mountain race must have alternate routes, cut-offs, evacuation plans and communications. Those things do not make a beautiful article, but they make safety. When an official recalls the memory of fog hiding the event, he is talking about image risk. When a runner looks at the sky before the start, they are thinking about life risk. Both concerns exist, but they do not carry the same weight.

A UTMB-series event can be a stepping stone for a region to learn how to run an international event. It can also be a trap: the region learns how to do communications but not how to do sport. The difference lies in who is responsible for the results list. If there is an independent competition department, officials, timing and data publication, the event will accumulate credibility. If there is only a communications and tourism department, the event will be beautiful but hollow. From the opening report, it is impossible to know which model the race follows.

For me, the most compelling part of trail running is not the medal. It is the pauses on the course: a runner stopping at an aid station, someone crossing a pass in fog, someone finishing after dark. Those moments need to be told through detail. But to tell them, a journalist needs names, times and positions. Without data, the story becomes scenery. Scenery is beautiful, but it cannot replace people.

Kaçkar by UTMB’s second edition achieved something difficult: it brought 2,000 people from 60 countries to a mountain region of Turkey. That is an organizational and communications achievement. It did not yet achieve the second thing: telling the outside world who ran fastest, who pushed a limit, who created a moment. That gap does not make the event a failure. It only means the event cannot yet be judged in the language of sport. And when an event cannot be judged, fans can only wait.

Wait until the third edition, and perhaps there will be a results list. Perhaps there will be the name of a woman winning in the mist. Perhaps there will be a published course record. Then Kaçkar by UTMB will have two stories: the tourism story and the sports story. The two can coexist. They simply need to be told with two different measures instead of being blended together. An event can sell a destination and still respect performance. That begins with one line of results.

When will a trail race in Rize be remembered for the name of a woman who won, rather than only for mist clearing over the mountains? When will a results list be treated as a required part of an opening report, not an appendix? When will a region understand that the most durable sports brand is built from specific people, not from beautiful frames? Those questions have no immediate answer. They remain with the event, with the organizers, with the people who ran 20 kilometers or farther, and with anyone who believes women’s sport must be recognized through names and times.