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

At Ayder, on the plateau beneath the Kaçkar range, the start signal of the second Kaçkar by UTMB did not come from a starter's pistol but from the hand of Türkiye's Minister of Youth and Sports, Osman Aşkın Bak. Behind him, 2,000 athletes from 60 countries were arranged in blocks along the trail climbing into the mountainside. I stood away from the press pack, in a spot where I could hear the breathing of the runners on the inside lane: short, even, deliberately restrained — the breathing of people who know more than twenty kilometres lie ahead and that they cannot burn everything in the first metre. Nobody announced a performance mark. No scoreboard hung a course record. There was fog, the smell of wet earth, and a field beginning to move.

Thirty years behind the changing-room door taught me that the smell of victory and the smell of tears are identical. But at Kaçkar something else surfaced from the very first second: this is a superbly organised, heavily sponsored, widely broadcast event with almost no performance data by which to judge it professionally.

The 800m final that year was not on the results sheet; it was in the way the woman tied her laces before stepping out. At Kaçkar I found the same thing in small details — one runner bending to check a hydration bladder a final time, another retying laces that had not loosened. None of those rituals appear in any official release.

The shape of the event

Kaçkar by UTMB is one node in the UTMB World Series, a network of international trail races operated and licensed by UTMB Group, the organiser of Ultra-Trail du Mont-Blanc in Chamonix, France. This is the second edition, meaning the brand is still building foundations rather than sitting in the flagship tier. Entry to the system is not by qualifying standard. Trail running has no ratified world record. There is no time standard. Athletes enter by lottery and through Running Stones — points earned at qualifying races — to win a place at the Mont-Blanc finals. In other words, this is a commercial ecosystem running parallel to the World Athletics competition system, operating on marketing and experience logic rather than Olympic qualification logic.

Where does the scale come from? Two thousand athletes and 60 countries is enough to turn a wire story into international news. But the structure behind it matters more.

The state machinery behind the race 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. DOKA is a regional public financing channel. When a regional development agency funds a sports event, the event is designed as a regional economic lever, not purely a federation competition.

The sponsor tier says the same thing: Turkish Airlines, TOGG, Turkcell, Maxis. These are national-champion brands, and an ordinary local trail race does not assemble them. The presence of Race Director Johan Essl, representing the central UTMB apparatus, confirms this is an official brand branch rather than a local race borrowing a name.

The organisers confirm a 20-kilometre course, with participation by Anadolu Agency figures and organisational representatives. A UTMB-series event almost certainly runs multiple distance categories, but the full distance menu was not disclosed. The Ayder plateau sits at roughly 1,300 to over 2,000 metres, so mountain terrain and altitude are material to difficulty, even though no course profile was published.

Data and the void

This is where three decades of experience forces plain speech: the report supplies not a single performance indicator. No winner. No finish times. No splits. No course record. No elite start list. No distance breakdown.

In track athletics, even without a mark, there is an anchor: entry standards, season ranking, personal bests. In trail running those anchors vanish. Performance is course-relative. The only way to assess a trail race's sporting quality is to examine its course records and elite-field depth. The report offers neither.

Ask what a woman knows about tactics, and I answer by counting an athlete's breaths from the stands, more accurately than a stopwatch. What I counted at Kaçkar is this: an event can speak loudly about scale while remaining completely silent about capability.

Minister Bak said ultra runners are world-class athletes with global followings. That is a rhetorically weighty framing. It is not evidence of the specific field's depth, because no elite name was given.

I am not saying the race lacks quality. I am saying nothing yet proves that quality — and those are two very different things.

The contrarian angle

The most notable thing at Kaçkar was not on the course. It was in the minister's line: Türkiye wants to associate Ayder and Rize with major organisations, the way Davos is associated with the economic forum. The goal is not producing trail champions. It is place-branding. The minister said plainly that sports tourism earns the country significantly.

Which is why the weather is the headline risk. The Rize Governor recalled that in the first edition Kaçkar was hidden by fog and rain. Black Sea mountain climate is a systemic hazard. Fog kills broadcast imagery, rain ruins the trail, and bad conditions can force cancellation or rerouting. The race's promotional value sits in the hands of something the organisers cannot control. Public-funding dependence adds a second risk: continuity depends on multi-year budget lines, not on commercial self-sufficiency.

What remains

In an age of data explosion, I still trust eyes, ears, and a heart that does not lie. But eyes are only reliable when used to look at what nobody has published.

Based on my own decades of watching events, an event can be a triumph of organisation, commerce and imagery while saying nothing about its sporting quality. Kaçkar by UTMB sits exactly there: 2,000 athletes, 60 countries, a funding and political machine built to last years, and an unfilled performance-data void.

What I want from the third edition is not another sponsor. It is a results sheet. Until finishers' times, course records, distance categories and elite fields are published, every claim of world-class standing remains a good line at a podium — and on the trail, good lines never run the climb for anyone.