Kaçkar by UTMB, Second Edition: 2,000 Runners, 60 Countries and a Data Gap That Needs Reading Properly

On the Ayder plateau, on the northern flank of the Kaçkar range, Turkey's Minister of Youth and Sports, Osman Aşkın Bak, fired the starting signal. Two thousand runners from sixty countries poured onto the trail. Among them were two Anadolu Ajansı sports journalists, Yusuf Özhan and Hasan Hüseyin Kul, entered in the 20-kilometre category. Race Director Johan Essl, representing the UTMB system, was on site. The original report captured all of that accurately.

And then the results sheet stayed empty.

No finishing times. No named winner. No course record. Not a single split. No cumulative elevation figure. For someone who reads numbers for a living, that silence deserves more attention than the figure of two thousand. "When numbers speak, all I have to do is listen." This time they chose not to speak. And at an international trail event, that silence is itself a signal worth decoding.

Putting the event in the right reference frame

UTMB stands for Ultra-Trail du Mont-Blanc, the trail race born in Chamonix, France, whose flagship distance runs roughly 170 km with close to 10,000 m of cumulative climb. From a single race, UTMB Group grew into a global network called the UTMB World Series. Each stop is a gate leading to the finals in Chamonix.

The fundamental difference between this system and World Athletics lies in entry mechanics. There is no time standard for qualifying to the UTMB finals. Athletes accumulate "Running Stones" at qualifying races and then enter a lottery. It is a commercial ecosystem running alongside the official competition structure, with its own rules, its own yardstick and its own logic of fairness.

That matters because it dictates how a race like Kaçkar by UTMB should be judged. This is the event's second edition, staged in Turkey's Eastern Black Sea region, and it is a satellite stop inside the UTMB World Series. It does not sit on the same ladder as national championships or Olympic-track races. Mistaking the ladder leads to mistaken conclusions.

A useful reference for Vietnamese readers: our domestic trail scene is already familiar with the place-branded race model — courses in Sa Pa, Moc Chau, Da Lat and along the central coast all sell scenery as much as difficulty. Kaçkar by UTMB runs on the same axis, differing only in brand scale and in how international its field has become.

Why trail running has no world records, and why that shapes evaluation

On the track and on the road, athletics has a measurement system stable for a century: 100 m, 400 m, the marathon at 42.195 km. Same distance, same surface, same wind and gradient standards. That is what makes a world record possible.

Trail is the opposite. Every course is its own geographic entity: gradient, footing, altitude, the number of climbs and descents, and the weather on the day. No federation ratifies a world record for a mountain route. What survives is the course record, tied to one specific day and one specific set of conditions.

The consequence is clear. To judge the sporting standard of a trail event, there are only two instruments: course records from previous editions, and the depth of the elite field on the start list. The Kaçkar report supplies neither.

So I make no judgement about the event's performance level. No conclusion, no inference, no filling of gaps with feeling. "Every number is a confession the race cannot deny." When no confession exists yet, the correct move is to record that none exists.

The three numbers actually available

First, two thousand athletes. This is a scale indicator, not a performance indicator. It speaks to organising capacity, logistics, safety and brand pull. It says nothing about how fast anyone ran.

Second, sixty countries. This is an internationalisation indicator, reflecting the reach of the parent brand more than the competitive quality of the field. A country having a participant does not mean it has a podium contender.

Third, the second edition. This is a maturity indicator. A race entering its second year sits in a brand-building phase, not a position-consolidating one. The gap between edition one and edition two is usually the window in which organisers patch logistics and standardise procedures.

What remains is infrastructure-level fact: a confirmed 20 km distance inferred from the two Anadolu Ajansı journalists entering it; the presence of Race Director Johan Essl as a UTMB representative; and a partner list featuring major names from the Turkish economy.

The 20 km figure also suggests a verifiable inference: UTMB-system events typically run multiple distances in parallel, from short courses for newcomers to ultra distances for the elite. The existence of a 20 km category implies a multi-distance structure, though the report does not list the full menu. That is an inference, not a fact, and I rate it medium confidence.

What the report withholds, and why that matters

The list of missing items is longer than the list of present ones.

No finish times for anyone, including the leaders. No rankings by gender or age group. No course profile: total elevation gain, maximum gradient, aid stations, cut-off thresholds. No training-volume or preparation-cycle data for any athlete. No medical, injury or withdrawal data. Not one named elite competitor.

This is not carelessness by the organisers. It is genre. The source is political and sports-tourism reporting: it covers a start ceremony attended by officials, not a performance report. The two document types serve different purposes and draw on different data sets.

A disciplined reader separates the parts usable for sporting analysis from the parts usable for industry analysis.

The industry-analysis portion is rich: participation scale, international spread, sponsorship structure, public governance structure, and the strategic message officials are sending.

The sporting-analysis portion is close to zero.

Terrain, climate and the ignored variables

The Kaçkar range and the Ayder plateau sit at roughly 1,300 to more than 2,000 metres above sea level. At that altitude the partial pressure of oxygen drops, and every effort costs more than it would at sea level. This is the first variable any performance analysis must handle.

The second is Black Sea climate. Fog and rain are local specialities. The Rize governorship recalled a telling detail: in the first edition, fog and rain hid the Kaçkar range. For an event whose communications value is bound to scenery, a mountain that does not appear is a double loss — to runner experience and to promotional effect.

The third is the inherent uncertainty of trail. Mud, rockfall, streams that fill after rain, and slopes with no anchor points. This is why trail races operate with cut-off thresholds at checkpoints rather than a single marker, and why they cannot be measured by one absolute number.

The report records geography only descriptively. Without course profile, cumulative elevation and the ratio of trail to road, any cross-event performance comparison is meaningless. Correlation is not causation, and a beautiful course is not automatically a hard one.

I have said it before: "At minute 70, the crowd sees collapse; I see a structure being rebuilt." In trail that moment usually arrives past the 70th kilometre, when glycogen runs out and the body is forced onto fat. But reading that moment requires split data. Without splits, there is no story. Only feeling — and feeling is not data.

Governance structure and money flow: who pays for this race

Look at the list of participating bodies and the picture sharpens considerably.

On the state side: the Ministry of Youth and Sports, the Türkiye Tourism Promotion and Development Agency, the Rize governorship and the Eastern Black Sea Development Agency (DOKA). On the corporate side: a national airline, a domestic carmaker, a major telecoms operator and other sponsoring brands.

This is the financial architecture of a tourism event, not of a championship. A national championship lives on federation budget and broadcast rights. An event of this type lives on local promotional budgets, brand sponsorship and the image value it creates for a destination.

That difference decides everything. It decides how organisers measure success: not in seconds, but in hotel room-nights, inbound flights, international press hits and shareable imagery.

It also decides risk. An event dependent on public budgets is exposed when budget priorities shift. An event dependent on brand sponsorship is exposed when renewal cycles tighten.

In sport, people routinely mistake a tourism model for a performance model and compare wrongly. A race that draws two thousand runners is an operational success. At the same time it may be a race without competitive depth. Both statements hold without contradiction.

The counterintuitive angle: the main product is not on the course

Most viewers skim this report and assume it is a sports event with a tourism component. Based on the data the source supplies, the ratio should be inverted: this is a destination-marketing campaign using sport as its vehicle.

The evidence is in the officials' own language. Minister Osman Aşkın Bak spoke of wanting to associate Ayder and Rize with major international organisations the way Davos is associated with economic forums. He also stated plainly that sports tourism delivers significant earnings to the country. That is the language of place marketing, not of athletic development.

In the same vein, he described ultra marathon runners as world-class athletes with a global following. That is a promotional claim. It is true of a handful of individuals in the global trail scene, but the report names none of them, so it cannot be verified at the level of this event.

One thing rarely mentioned deserves clarity: the UTMB system operates as a franchise model. UTMB owns the brand, the technical standards, the safety standards and the Running Stones mechanism. Local partners supply terrain, infrastructure, labour and political networks. In return, the locality receives international visitors and image value.

That structure explains how a Turkish mountain region enters a global system within a few years. It also explains why the results sheet is not the main product. The main product is imagery, a place name, and a passport for that place into the destination lists of the international trail community.

I do not believe in luck; I believe in what has been repeated often enough. One edition cannot form a diagnosis. Two begin to form a pattern. The third will reveal whether this is a media burst or a genuine pillar.

The biggest risk is not financial — it is the sky

If I had to rank the risks, weather comes first.

Kaçkar sits in the Black Sea climate zone, where rain and fog are annual fixtures. The Rize authorities recorded that in the first edition, fog and rain hid the range. For a race whose promotional value rests on broadcast imagery, bad weather attacks the product directly.

Operationally, bad weather triggers a chain: hypothermia risk, reduced visibility on trail sections, harder rescue access, and in the worst case a shortened or cancelled course. A cancelled mountain race costs more than a race day: it costs credibility with the international trail community, which has a long memory.

Risk two is public-budget dependence. The presence of a regional development agency and local government shows public money as a load-bearing pillar. That pillar can hold for years, but it always sits within political and budget cycles.

Risk three is the expectation gap. When state communications push the story to a "world-class" register while neither the elite start list nor results are published, the gap between image and reality can be filled with belief. Belief is fine for a ceremony; it is not enough for an analysis.

Doping and competition-dispute risk is essentially absent from the source. For a mass-participation event, exposure to anti-doping issues is far lower than for a record attempt on the road. There is no risk signal — but no reassurance either.

One small detail is worth noting: the minister mentioned that trails have cameras so participants can take and share photos. For organisers, that is a safety tool and a media tool in one infrastructure. For an analyst, it is evidence that athlete tracking has been deployed. If so, the data exists. It simply has not been published.

A view from Vietnam: three transferable lessons

From the perspective of a sports-data practitioner in Vietnam, three points stand out.

First, the place-branded race model is not foreign to us. Trail events in Sa Pa, Moc Chau, Da Lat and along the central coast have followed that road for years. The common weakness is not terrain — Vietnam has no shortage of difficulty — it is data. Very few races publish full course profiles, and even fewer publish split analysis by checkpoint.

Second, UTMB's points-and-lottery mechanism is a branding lesson. They do not sell entry on a time standard. They sell entry on value accumulated across races. That builds system loyalty, and it explains how a race in a remote mountain region drew an international field by its second edition.

Third — and I will say this plainly — domestic organisers need to publish more data. A complete results table, a course profile, a checkpoint split sheet: these are assets. They allow year-on-year comparison, weather-impact assessment and young-talent identification. Without them, a race is only a collective memory.

"Distance never lies; we simply have not been patient enough to listen." That line of mine applies to every athlete, and to every organiser. Data does not appear on its own. It must be designed to exist, recorded, archived and published.

Six signals to track for the third edition

The elite start list. If edition three publishes it in advance, the event's competitive standard can be assessed for the first time.

A results sheet with finishing times and full rankings. This is the minimum condition for anyone to analyse it seriously.

Course records by distance. We need to know how many distances the event runs, the cumulative elevation of each, and the year-on-year benchmark.

Finish rate among participants. This measures operational capability and true course difficulty, and reveals where organisers set their cut-offs.

Contract renewal with the UTMB World Series and sponsor re-signing cycles. This is the durability measure of the model.

Finally, race-day weather. If Kaçkar is fog-bound again and the programme still runs in full, the organisers will have successfully handled their biggest risk.

The data is still out there waiting. I will be here, taking notes and waiting. And if someone tells me next time they ran a mountain race with not a single time marker, I will say: write it down next time — because out there someone always wants to hear your story, as long as it is written in a language everyone can read.