Kaçkar by UTMB Second Edition: 60 Countries on the Trail, and the Data Gap Behind It

Fog. That is the single word the Governor of Rize used to describe the first edition. Kaçkar was hidden by fog and rain. The mountain was there, the course was there, but the only thing the organisers brought home was a set of grey frames and a lesson about how the Black Sea terrain does not care how many months you prepared. In the second edition, as two thousand runners from sixty countries gathered in Ayder, the first thing mentioned was light. Not records. Not results. Light. Two thousand people. Sixty countries. Two beautiful numbers, and I believe them. But if you ask me who won, how long they took, how many kilometres the course covers, how many distance categories there are, I have to say I do not know. Not because I am lazy. The report I read, from Anadolu Ajansı, covers a starting ceremony. It counts people, countries, officials and sponsors. It does not count a single second on the course. The paradox sits right there. A sporting event where we know the scale precisely but know nothing about the outcome is telling us it does not operate on the logic of a competition. It operates on another logic. To read it properly, I have to switch toolkits: from results sheets to cash-flow sheets, from aid-station splits to hotel occupancy, from individual performance to a franchised brand. Over years in this trade, I learned something uncomfortable. When an event does not publish results, an analyst's first reflex is suspicion. The second reflex, and usually the more accurate one, is to ask whether results are the product that event actually sells. In the case of Kaçkar by UTMB's second edition, the answer lies in its structure. What this race is, and who stands behind it Kaçkar by UTMB is a trail race within the UTMB World Series, held in the Kaçkar mountains around the Ayder plateau in Rize province, north-eastern Turkey. This is the second edition. That number two matters more than it appears: it places the event in a brand-building phase, not a harvesting phase. UTMB stands for Ultra-Trail du Mont-Blanc, the trail race that began in Chamonix, France, and over more than two decades has become the most powerful brand in the sport. What UTMB achieved is not simply putting on a good race. It turned a race into an ecosystem: satellite events worldwide, a points mechanism, a finals night at the foot of Mont-Blanc, and a community of runners willing to fly halfway around the world to be there. The race director of Kaçkar by UTMB is Johan Essl, a UTMB official. This detail is small but telling. A purely local race would not need central brand personnel at the helm. That presence confirms this is a node in a network, not a spontaneous playground. On distances, the report confirms only one figure: two officials from Anadolu Ajansı and the Turkish sports agency, Yusuf Özhan and Hasan Hüseyin Kul, ran the twenty-kilometre course. For a UTMB-series event, multiple distances are the norm, typically from a short experiential category up to ultra distances well beyond 42.195 kilometres with significant elevation gain. But the full menu is not stated. I note that as a gap, and I do not fill it with speculation. On terrain, the Ayder plateau sits at roughly 1,300 to over 2,000 metres. In trail running, altitude is a heavy variable: it changes heart rate, climbing speed and how energy is distributed across hours. A course at that elevation cannot be read with the same ruler as a flat marathon. What stands out most, though, is the list of organisations behind it. Turkey's 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. On the sponsorship side: Turkish Airlines, TOGG, Turkcell, Maxis. The national airline. The national electric carmaker. The country's largest telecoms operator. This is not the roster of a grassroots race funded by a few local clubs. It is a coalition between the state and national-champion brands. Minister of Youth and Sports Osman Aşkın Bak spoke at the opening. He described ultra runners as world-class athletes with fans across the globe. He said sports tourism brings significant earnings to the country. And he made a comparison I consider the key to the whole event: he wants Ayder and Rize associated with organisations like this, similar to how Davos is associated with the economic forum. That is a very direct statement. It tells us the goal is not medals. The goal is place-branding. Trail running has no world records Before going deeper into the economic model, I need to rebuild one professional principle, because it governs how I read this report. Track athletics has world records. Swimming has world records. Timed sports on a track have absolute comparison standards, because courses are standardised, conditions controlled, and measuring equipment calibrated. Trail running is the opposite. There is no ratified world record. Every course is its own entity: different length, different cumulative elevation, different surface, different weather, and often a different organising year. Performance here is only relative, and the only comparable thing is the course record, meaning comparison against itself in the past. This leads to a consequence outsiders often miss. In trail running, the sporting quality of an event is not measured by time. It is measured by two other things: the course record and the depth of the elite field. Who has won here, in what time, who is returning this year, how many genuinely dangerous names are at the front. That is the ruler. And the Kaçkar by UTMB report provides neither. No winner's name. No time. No course record. No elite field. In other words, I can describe this event by scale, by structure, by resources, by policy objectives, but I cannot say a single word about its competitive quality without inventing it. And I choose not to invent, because in this trade I do not guess football; I measure the distance between expectation and the goal. Here that distance is wide, and admitting how wide it is happens to be the most valuable conclusion I can offer. One clarification to avoid being misread. A lack of performance data does not automatically make an event inferior. It only makes it unassessable by the performance ruler. A restaurant that does not publish its recipe does not serve bad food. But if you are invited to a banquet and the hosts only talk about the number of guests, you should understand what that banquet is selling. Mandatory kit and the safety culture of trail running There is a regulatory layer in trail running the report does not mention, yet it governs how any mountain race operates. That layer is the mandatory equipment list. Unlike road running, where you can line up with a pair of shoes and comfortable kit, trail running binds participants to a minimum equipment list: a waterproof jacket with a windproof membrane, a headlamp, a survival blanket, a minimum water capacity, a phone with emergency numbers saved, and depending on the race, a tracking device. Organisers check at random at the start and at aid stations. Miss one item and you are disqualified, not time-penalised. In this sport, equipment cheating is treated as a life-safety matter, not a performance matter. Alongside that are cut-off times at each station. A station has a closing hour. Arrive late and you leave the course, whether or not you still have strength. The mechanism exists for logistics and rescue: medical teams, aid stations and evacuation routes can only be maintained at certain points during certain hours. A mountain course above a thousand metres tightens those cut-offs further. In that context, the Minister's remark that all trails have cameras for taking and sharing photos carries a double meaning. It is a tracking feature, and it is also a promotional tool. But it is not a competition rule. And here the data goes quiet again. The report states no cancellation threshold, no medical plan, no alternate course, no number of aid stations, no cut-off times. For an event in the Black Sea mountains, where rain and fog are annual certainties, these are the details analysts need most, and we do not have them. Two data cultures I came out of road running. Years working at a running magazine drilled one professional habit into me: every race must leave behind a numerical trace. On the road, that trace is dense. Chip systems time every five kilometres. Finish-line photos are analysed to hundredths of a second. Wind is recorded, and a record is only ratified if the headwind component does not exceed two metres per second. Temperature, humidity and course elevation are filed. Athletes undergo doping control. There are age-graded tables. There is negative-split analysis. Everything is standardised to the point where you can compare a runner in Berlin with a runner in Osaka after adjusting for conditions. In trail running, the numerical trace is much sparser. You have a tracking device for position. You have aid-station arrival times. You have dropout rates. You have courses adjusted by weather year to year, to the point where a course record can be voided simply because that season was drier. You have irreconcilable differences between two twenty-kilometre courses where one climbs 800 metres and the other climbs 1,200. That difference is not a small technicality. It determines how we read the figure of two thousand athletes. In road-running data culture, a large participation number usually comes with an entry standard, and the entry standard reveals quality. In trail data culture, a large participation number speaks to operational capacity and destination appeal, not competitive quality. Two cultures, two readings, and mixing them is the most common error I see on forums. I remember once translating figures for a running report in Tokyo. A reader wrote in asking why the same athlete could run faster at one race yet be ranked lower at another. The answer is simple: the courses are not the same. But explaining that to someone who has never climbed a gradient took me half a page. Since then, whenever I read a report about a mountain race, my first question is always what the course looks like. How two thousand people were manufactured Now a more interesting question appears. Where does the figure of two thousand athletes from sixty countries come from? In sports with entry standards, participation numbers are a consequence of performance. To reach the final of a major athletics meet, you must run fast enough. Trail running works differently. Entry to the Chamonix finals runs through a lottery and the accumulation of Running Stones, points earned at UTMB World Series events. You do not pass a time standard. You buy lottery tickets by showing up. That structure has a very concrete consequence. It turns each satellite race into an international draw station. A runner in Norway does not need to be the fastest in Europe to be in Kaçkar; they need a reason to come, a valid ticket and a flight. And when the reason to come is supplied by a global brand plus a national airline, a flow of people from sixty countries becomes a predictable outcome rather than a miracle. This is where I want to pause, because it connects directly to my own experience. In 2026, when football returned in empty stadiums, I collected data from the first twenty-six matches and found home advantage collapsing from roughly 0.44 goals per game to about 0.15. A long-standing belief about the crowd dissolved after an experiment nobody wanted to run. Home advantage is a hypothesis; COVID was the accidental test. I tell that story because it taught me a principle: a number has no fixed meaning. It only has meaning within the structure that produced it. Two thousand athletes in a competition with a time standard is a signal about sporting quality. Two thousand athletes in a lottery system sponsored by a national airline is a signal about organisational capacity and destination appeal. Same number, two entirely different stories. And read correctly, something else becomes clear. Sixty countries is not an indicator of a powerful Turkish trail-running scene. It is an indicator that Turkey has bought access to the distribution network of a global brand. This is franchising logic, not selection logic. A base layer made of public money I want to go into the least-discussed part, yet the one that determines the event's survival: money. Looking at the organisations behind Kaçkar by UTMB, three layers emerge. The first is central institutions: the Ministry of Youth and Sports and the national tourism promotion agency. The second is local and regional institutions: the Rize Governorship and DOKA. The third is corporate sponsorship: Turkish Airlines, TOGG, Turkcell, Maxis. The second layer is the notable one. DOKA, the Eastern Black Sea Development Agency, is a regional public financing body designed to inject development capital into the area. Its presence on the organising side tells us the event is anchored in the regional development budget, not only in sports or marketing budgets. In other words, part of the cost of staging this course is paid with tax money under the rationale of local economic development. I do not say that as criticism. Many economies use sport as a lever to attract visitors, and that is a sound strategy when you possess a resource nature gave you and cannot sell any other way. But it creates a risk structure readers should know. An event fed by public budget cycles depends for its survival on political cycles, not on ticket revenue. From here we can trace the transmission of this event through the economy. Upstream is local organisational capacity plus the UTMB brand licence, funded by public capital. Midstream is the event and its sponsor system. Downstream is tourism, national image promotion and destination brand value. If I had to compress it into one sentence: the main export product of this race is not performance, it is scenery. And I think we need to pause here, because scenery is a very particular commodity. It cannot be stored. It cannot be fully insured. And it cannot be produced further when there is no light. An event inside a larger story There is a detail easy to overlook in this report: the presence of politics at the highest level. This is not a race opened by a local sports official. It involves members of parliament and is tied to President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan's presence in the region. The wider context makes that clearer. Turkey has just passed through a remarkable sporting cycle, in which the national women's volleyball team won major titles on the continental and world stage, generating a wave of national pride. And Turkey will host the European Games in Istanbul in 2027. Placed inside that sequence, Kaçkar by UTMB reveals a consistent logic. A country preparing to host a multi-sport continental event does not stage small races at random. Every international event is a rehearsal of capability: receiving international visitors, operating safely, communicating images, coordinating between ministries, local government and private enterprise. Here the Minister's Davos comparison becomes very telling. Davos is not famous because it hosts a conference. Davos is famous because the whole world knows that every winter, major decisions are discussed there. That is a place brand built over decades. A minister stating that ambition outright shows the aspiration is not small, and it also shows this event will be measured by a completely different ruler than performance. The contrarian angle: the results gap is a feature Now I want to make an argument that runs against the usual reflex of analysts. When reading a sports report with no results, the default reaction is to criticise the journalism, or to suspect the organisers are hiding something. I think that reading misses the most important point. In an event operating on a sports-tourism model, results are not forgotten. Results are not the product. The product is the experience of two thousand people who just completed a mountain distance, and the image of a plateau transmitted around the world. This is an entirely legitimate model. It is simply different from the ones I usually analyse. And when two different models get mixed up, mistakes happen on both sides. The first side errs by reading promotional statements as data. The Minister says ultra runners are world-class athletes with global fans. That is true at the level of the sport, but it says nothing about the specific field present in Kaçkar, because the report names not a single elite competitor. Between this sport has the best in the world and this race has the best in the world lies a large distance, and that distance can only be closed by a start list and a results sheet. Right now, neither exists. The second side errs in the opposite direction, dismissing the weight of what can be counted. Two thousand people from sixty countries is a real operational achievement. Moving that many people of that many nationalities onto a plateau in north-eastern Turkey requires logistics, safety, medical cover, accommodation, transport and a sufficiently strong receiving system. A race in its second edition doing that is no small thing. Then there is the variable local authorities raised themselves, and it caught my attention more than anything else. The Governor of Rize recalled that in the first edition, Kaçkar was hidden by fog and rain. He spoke of the images that would be broadcast from this place, that they would be very beautiful. Put those two sentences side by side and you get a perfect paradox. The thing that creates this event's value, the Black Sea mountain landscape, is also the thing that can erase it in a single morning. Fog does not ruin the course. Fog ruins the product. This is why I rank weather risk highest in any analysis of this event. Not doping risk, not result-dispute risk, but climate risk. A mountain race in a rainy region can be cancelled or shortened on safety grounds, and that is true everywhere in the world. But for an event whose media value is bound tightly to imagery, a hidden season is a season of lost revenue. There is one more point to put on the table. Is the absence of results inherent to trail running? I do not think so. Chamonix has a very strong results-watching culture; fans follow every aid station, every split, every withdrawal. The international trail community cares about results no less than the marathon community. So the gap in Kaçkar is not a trait of the sport. It is a trait of a development stage, or of a chosen emphasis. If I had to predict, I would say that as the race moves into its third and fourth editions, pressure to publish results will grow, because sporting credibility is what nourishes commercial credibility over the long term. No race lives forever on scenery. Scenery brings people once. Results bring them back. The gap between expectation and reality I want to build a small comparison table, because this is the tool I use most when reading promotional reports. In the expectation column we have the image of an international race gathering world-class athletes, backed by the state, with wide media reach and a clear contribution to local tourism. In the verifiable reality column we have two thousand athletes from sixty countries, a second edition, an organising coalition of public institutions and four major brands, one confirmed twenty-kilometre distance, and not a single result. The widest gap sits in competitive quality. On tourism and promotion, the gap is much narrower, because the sixty-country figure is directional evidence strong enough to show real appeal. My point is that the optimism here is uneven. It is excessive on the sporting side and reasonable on the destination side. There is an emotional signal worth noting. There is no sign of panic in the report, only promotional enthusiasm. But that enthusiasm is amplified by the institutions themselves, not by the market. When a message is issued by a minister, a governor and MPs simultaneously, its volume does not reflect its depth. This is something I always have to remind myself: echo is not data. Signals to watch I always close an analysis with a list of what to observe next, because today's data is only valuable if you know which data you are waiting for. First, the start list and results sheet. The day they are published, the event's competitive quality becomes measurable for the first time. Until then, every statement about the field's standard remains a statement. Second, the full distance menu and course records. These two things turn a race into an analysable object. Without them, we can only discuss logistics, not sport. Third, the sponsorship renewal cycle. A sponsor coalition of national brands re-signing for a third edition signals the model stands on its own feet. If brands withdraw and only public money remains, the story becomes very different. Fourth, the weather, and what organisers do with it. Contingency plans, alternate courses, cancellation thresholds: these do not appear in photographs but determine whether the race survives the next decade. Fifth, public budget lines. A shift in funding allocation at DOKA or the tourism agency will be the earliest signal about the event's sustainability. And sixth, further out, the runway to 2027. Turkey will host the European Games in Istanbul, and a country rehearsing its capability to stage international events rarely does so at random. Every mountain race, every international visitor, every beautiful frame broadcast is a line in that capability file. What I take from Kaçkar by UTMB is not the course. It is how a country turns a mountain into a brand, and how a global brand turns a mountain into a branch. When data speaks, laughter is only noise, but here what spoke first was the gap. And a gap correctly acknowledged is worth more than a conclusion assembled in haste. The empty summer years ago taught me that an empty chair is also a player. In Rize, that empty chair has the shape of an unpublished results sheet. It is still sitting on the pitch, waiting to be called by name.