Kaçkar by UTMB: 2,000 Runners, 60 Countries and a Data Vacuum

Fog. That is the word the Governor of Rize chose to remember the first edition. That year, the Kaçkar range vanished behind mist and rain, as if the mountain refused to let anyone see it. In the second season, when Minister of Youth and Sports Osman Aşkın Bak fired the starting signal for Kaçkar by UTMB, 2,000 runners from 60 countries stood waiting at the foot of the mountain, on the Ayder plateau. I read that number three times. Two thousand people. Sixty countries. And then I noticed something strange: across all the published information, there was not a single champion's name, not a single finishing time, not a single course record. An event of this scale, and its sporting core was almost entirely absent.

From years of following long-distance races, I have learned one thing: to understand an event, you must first understand which ecosystem it belongs to. Kaçkar by UTMB is not part of the World Athletics competition system. It is one node in the UTMB World Series — a commercial race circuit run by UTMB Group, headquartered in Chamonix, France, the birthplace of Ultra-Trail du Mont-Blanc. Entry to the Mont-Blanc finals does not come from running fast; it comes from Running Stones, a form of accumulated points earned at qualifying races and used as lottery weights. This is a race with no time standard, no national-team selection, and — true to the nature of trail running — no ratified world records.

The event takes place in Rize, in eastern Türkiye's Black Sea region, beneath the Kaçkar range, on mountain terrain ranging from roughly 1,300 to over 2,000 metres. A 20 km course was confirmed when officials themselves ran it, hinting at the multi-distance format typical of the UTMB circuit, though the full distance menu was not disclosed. The Race Director is Johan Essl, a UTMB official — a sign that the central brand participates directly rather than merely licensing its name.

Behind the course stands a dense institutional coalition: 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 regional public financing body. The sponsor list is equally telling: Turkish Airlines, TOGG, Turkcell, Maxis — all national champions. When a mountain race assembles both the state apparatus and the country's market leaders, we are no longer looking at a mere race, but at a project. And that project has a name: sports tourism.

This is where I want to pause longer. Trail running is a sport without world records. There is no absolute yardstick, because every course has its own gradient, altitude and terrain. So the sporting quality of a trail event can only be assessed through two things: course records and the depth of the elite field. The Kaçkar by UTMB announcement provides neither. No winner's name. No times. No records. We know 2,000 people ran, but not who among them is a world-leading runner, nor how long the longest course was. An empty leaderboard, while the participation figure is overflowing.

In athletics journalism, there is a familiar confusion between two kinds of event: the championship and the mass race. A championship is measured by the gap between first and second place, by how many athletes meet the standard. A mass race is measured by participation numbers and reach. Kaçkar by UTMB has the shape of a championship — an international organiser, a race director, a minister firing the start — but is told as a mass race. And when we try to judge it by sporting measures, all we get back is a vacuum.

In other words, this is an event sold on scale, not on performance. And in truth, that is not necessarily wrong. It merely reveals that the event's real objective lies off the course. Minister Osman Aşkın Bak called ultra marathon runners "world-class athletes with followers worldwide". That is a rhetorical framing, not evidence of the specific field's depth at Kaçkar. But it exposes the underlying mindset: sport here is the means, not the end.

The crux lies in a line quoted from the officials themselves: "We want to associate Ayder and Rize with organisations like this, similar to how Davos is associated with economic forums." A mountain region is borrowing the UTMB brand to position itself on the world map — and that brand only holds value if the images transmitted are beautiful. That is why fog is not merely a weather issue. It is a business issue. In its first year, Kaçkar was hidden by fog; this year, people say the images broadcast from here will be very beautiful. But beautiful images depend on the sky, and the Black Sea sky promises nothing.

Here a paradox appears. The UTMB World Series is expanding into new geographies, turning local races into global nodes. But when an event is state-backed and sold on imagery, the sporting side is easily pushed to the margins. We have 60 countries, but not a single name. We have a minister firing the start, but no results board. We have cameras "on every trail to take and share photos" — in the minister's words — but no pace analysis. The minister mentioned steep climbs and difficult trails, but not a single mandatory safety-equipment rule, even though that is the core of any serious trail event.

And there is a risk few mention: public money. DOKA, the ministry, the governor's office all stand behind one race. That means its survival depends on budgets and political will, not on how many people run fast. If that money shifts direction, the event disappears — no matter how beautiful the course. This is a model many countries are adopting: using an international sports brand as a distribution channel for their national image. Türkiye is not doing this only in Rize. It is also aiming for the 2027 European Games in Istanbul, and hosting a UTMB-standard trail race is a way to prove hosting capability ahead of a larger event.

I am not opposed to this model. I only want to call it by its right name. This is a sports-tourism project, and it is doing that job rather well. The problem only arises when people slap the label "world-class" on an event that has never shown the world a single result. When promotion outruns performance, real sports fans — those who care about who ran faster than whom — feel shut out of the story.

There is one thing I have always believed: the most beautiful things in sport usually lie outside the spotlight. The 800th runner on the Kaçkar trail, the one nobody films, the one who falls and stands back up — that is the soul of trail running. A mountain race becomes a common language between Turks, French and Vietnamese, not because it has a big prize, but because the mountain does not distinguish who stands on it.

The question I leave behind is not whether Kaçkar is beautiful. It is this: when a sport learns to sell itself through imagery, does it still remember what it was once loved for?