Kaçkar by UTMB second edition: 2,000 runners from 60 countries walk into the Rize fog

The starting line sits on the Ayder plateau in Rize province, in Turkey's Eastern Black Sea region. The man giving the signal is Osman Aşkın Bak, Minister of Youth and Sports. Behind him stand 2,000 runners from 60 countries, grouped by distance, waiting for the horn to send them into the Kaçkar slopes. This is the second edition of Kaçkar by UTMB, a stop on the UTMB World Series circuit.

The report ends there. No winner's name. No finish time for anyone. No results list, no splits, no course record, no elite start list. An event gathering two thousand people from sixty countries, and its most essential element — the race itself — vanished from the page the moment the horn sounded.

I have spent many nights in front of a screen watching trail races streamed live from Chamonix, from the Alps, from courses where you have to climb ten hours to reach the first aid station. I know that feeling: images so beautiful that viewers forget each frame sits on top of a body being ground down hour by hour. And I know another paradox just as well — the events with the biggest fields are usually the ones with the thinnest performance records. Coverage reports scale, scenery, terrain, and the fact that people came from sixty countries. It rarely reports who ran faster than whom.

Every time I pick up a microphone, I learn to be quieter inside my own head. That is how I noticed that a three-hundred-word news item can say nothing at all about the sport it is covering.

A start line with no results sheet behind it is a start line whose nature has been misread.

The ecosystem behind the horn

To understand Kaçkar by UTMB, you have to understand what it belongs to. UTMB — Ultra-Trail du Mont-Blanc — began as a trail race around the Mont-Blanc massif, centred on the French town of Chamonix. From a single race it grew into a brand operating a global circuit called the UTMB World Series. Events in that circuit do not award Olympic places, do not sit inside World Athletics rankings, and carry no time standard for selection.

The pathway to the Mont-Blanc final works differently from track and field. Runners accumulate Running Stones — points earned at qualifying races — and those points act as lottery weights for a place in the Chamonix final. Entry comes largely from weighted chance, not from having run faster than someone else over a prescribed distance. It is a clever commercial architecture: it turns hundreds of thousands of amateur runners worldwide into customers of one brand, and turns every satellite race into a gateway back to the centre.

Kaçkar by UTMB is one of those gateways. The name is tied to the Kaçkar range, a granite massif in the Eastern Black Sea region. The terrain sits at roughly 1,300 to more than 2,000 metres, meaning altitude and mountain ground are real variables in the course's difficulty — though the report publishes no elevation profile and no full distance menu.

One detail stands out. The race director is Johan Essl, a UTMB official. A race in the Turkish mountains having a race director from the brand's central apparatus shows this is not a local event trading on a name. It is an official branch of the system. UTMB does not merely license its name; it puts people inside the operation.

The only confirmed distance in the report is 20 km, run by Anadolu Ajansı and AASK staff including Yusuf Özhan and Hasan Hüseyin Kul. The existence of a 20 km category, combined with how UTMB World Series events typically operate, suggests Kaçkar by UTMB runs multiple distances in parallel — usually a short entry-level race, a mid-distance, and one long symbolic course. That is inference, not fact. The organiser did not publish the full distance list here.

When distances are withheld, the definition of achievement is withheld too.

The power structure behind a trail race

Look at the institutions behind Kaçkar by UTMB and it is clear this is not the story of a local running club. Turkey's Ministry of Youth and Sports sits inside the organising structure. The Türkiye Tourism Promotion and Development Agency is involved. The Rize governorship is involved. DOKA — the Eastern Black Sea Development Agency — is involved. Four separate streams of public money flow into one event.

On the commercial side the list is not small either: Turkish Airlines, TOGG, Turkcell, Maxis. These are national champion brands — the flag carrier, a state-backed electric vehicle maker, and major telecoms. A mountain trail race attracting that sponsor tier signals an event capitalised at national level, far beyond a local road race.

The structure repeats a widening model: local government funds infrastructure and organisation, the tourism body handles image and media, national corporates buy presence, and an international sports brand rents credibility. All four benefit in the short term, which is exactly why the model spreads quickly.

Based on my experience following long-distance races, I always separate two questions. How well is this event run — and how much does the sport grow from it? Those can have entirely different answers. A race can meet safety standards, carry full medical cover, GPS tracking, precisely designed aid stations and carefully marked course, and still contribute nothing to producing a new generation of athletes.

Fog as a strategic variable

The detail I read most carefully was not the figure of two thousand. It was the provincial leader's reminder that last season Kaçkar was hidden by fog and rain. This is an event designed around imagery, and its imagery depends on a variable nobody controls.

The Eastern Black Sea mountain climate is damp year-round, rainy, quick to fog over, with visibility that shifts by the hour. For a race on a plateau, that is a first-order operational risk. Thick fog does not only ruin broadcast frames; it cuts runner visibility, slows rescue teams, complicates access to points on course, and in the worst case forces a course change or a mid-race stoppage.

In the report, the provincial leader himself stressed that the images broadcast from here would be very beautiful. That is a marketing line, but it accidentally admits something important: the event's value is tied to image quality. If value is anchored to the frame, then weather becomes a genuine stakeholder with veto power.

An event whose value depends on the weather is betting on the one thing that cannot be negotiated.

This deserves a longer pause. In sports with strict measurement — athletics, swimming, weightlifting — weather is a noted, adjusted variable. Wind is measured, temperature logged, records flagged as assisted or not. In trail running, weather is not adjusted for; it is accepted as part of the game. That means every performance comparison carries a very long conditional clause about conditions.

And when the report itself publishes no performances, that conditional clause becomes pure blank space.

Why there are no records, and why it matters

Trail running has no officially ratified world records. That is structural: each course is its own geographic entity — length, gradient, surface, altitude, weather all differ. No two trail courses are alike, so there is no common denominator for comparison.

A record is only an excuse to remember a person, not a number. But precisely because a record is only an excuse, the absence of records does not mean the absence of stories. The problem at Kaçkar by UTMB lies elsewhere: even the excuse is missing. No finish times, no placings, no winner's name. The excuse is blank, so the story has nowhere to begin.

In this sport, the quality of an event can only be judged two ways: course records, or the depth of the elite field. The report provides neither. It provides scale — two thousand people, sixty countries. Scale is logistics data, not sporting data. A conference with two thousand attendees is a large conference; that says nothing about the quality of its papers.

This is the point I consider most important about how this kind of event gets covered, and it is something I learned working with statistics tables for years. I have spent hours in front of spreadsheets, muttering numbers aloud to find a rhythm worth telling. But some tables have nothing to tell, and recognising that is also a skill. Silence in front of an empty table is honest. Filling an empty table with adjectives is not.

Public money and the sustainability question

DOKA's involvement deserves separate attention. It is a regional development agency, meaning the money does not come purely from a sports budget but from regional economic development funding. That packaging has political advantages — a trail race presented as an infrastructure project rather than entertainment spending.

But it also creates dependency. When an event lives on public money, its survival is tied to budget cycles, to the political priorities of each period, and to whether the project is judged a success in evaluation reports. A race living on public money can disappear in one budget season. A race living on private money can disappear in one revenue season. Both are fragile, but differently, and the first is usually harder for outsiders to forecast.

At the sponsor level, I see a familiar problem. I have written many times about how shirt advertising is gradually loosening the bond between clubs and their local communities — when the logo on a chest changes every season, when global sponsors care only about exposure metrics and return on investment, the link between a team and its city thins out. The Kaçkar by UTMB model carries the same signature. Turkish Airlines, TOGG, Turkcell, Maxis — these are brands with nationwide interests, not specific interests in Ayder. They pay to appear in a beautiful frame, and when that frame stops being beautiful, or when another event offers better exposure metrics, they leave without losing anything.

That is why I always look at whether an event sustains a durable local organising layer, rather than at the sponsor list.

The industry's transmission machinery

How an event like Kaçkar by UTMB creates value can be imagined as a three-tier flow. Upstream is local organising capacity plus the UTMB brand licence. Midstream is the event plus its sponsors. Downstream is tourism, destination image, and regional brand value.

The upstream tier is funded by public money. The midstream is run on private money. The downstream returns to the local economy and national reputation. The flow is not financially closed: it needs public money at the entrance and only returns value indirectly at the exit. That is why this model tends to persist for years where governments treat it as strategic investment, and tends to break where priorities shift.

The minister said plainly that sports tourism brings significant earnings to the country. That is verifiable in direction, but unquantified. No visitor numbers, average spend, or length of stay were published. So I note the direction and leave the quantification open.

One small technical detail is worth logging. The minister noted that all courses have cameras for taking and sharing photos. That is a safety and promotional feature, not a competition rule. But it shows the event is designed for image production — meaning its value, as its organisers define it, lies in generating content, not in generating results.

Nothing in the report covers mandatory kit rules, per-station cut-offs, medical checks, or anti-doping policy. For a long mountain race, these are core parts of the rulebook. Their absence just means they were not mentioned, not that they do not exist.

What the report does not say, and what that reveals

There is another way to read this silence, and I think it is more useful than pure criticism. When a sports news item contains no sporting fact, it reflects the true nature of the event it covers. Kaçkar by UTMB is staged as a tourism event with a sporting component, not a sports competition with a tourism component. In that structure, the winner matters less than whether the event happened, drew enough people, and produced enough beautiful images.

That is not necessarily bad. It is simply a different product. But it creates a consequence I want to state clearly: if a country only imports a race brand without building measurement systems, it has an event, not a sport.

I have seen both models over years of watching sport. I remember my first time at a commentary desk at the CONCACAF Women's Championship in October 2026, when I was eighteen and an intern in Texas. I mispronounced the name of a young Costa Rican forward three times in the first half, and a college sports forum laughed at me. I spent the following month rewatching fifteen matches, noting how to say the names of more than two hundred players from ten countries.

I learned something from that I still use today: a name is the first door of respect. A report with no winner's name opens no doors at all. It speaks of an event without speaking of anyone in it.

I once thought I came to commentate on matches; it turned out I came to listen to people. The same holds for trail: a race with no runners' names is a race with no one to listen to.

The contrarian angle: when tourism stands in front of sport

There is an unspoken assumption running through this story: that a region becoming a stop on an international circuit automatically benefits the sport there. That sounds reasonable but is not automatically true.

Importing a race brand and developing a homegrown trail scene are two different jobs, requiring different resources and producing different outcomes. Staging a UTMB World Series stop creates a marked course, a safety apparatus, aid infrastructure, a volunteer network, and a flow of international amateur runners. It does not automatically create a coach who can periodise an 80 km runner, a sports medicine system that understands rhabdomyolysis after an ultra, or a domestic race calendar dense enough for young athletes to sharpen against someone every month.

This gap is often missed because it cannot be seen on television. A successful event has a start date and an end date, images, attendance numbers. A successful development system is invisible for years, has no opening ceremony, and no sponsor wants its name on it. So in resource decisions, the visible always beats the invisible.

A further point: the claim that ultra marathon runners are world-class athletes with global followings is rhetorical characterisation, not evidence about the quality of this year's field. The report names no elite athlete. I record that as a gap, not as a false statement.

There is something more durable than titles: how people remember the way you played. For an event, that memory is built from specific performances — a chase on the final climb, a pass at the seventh aid station, a runner crossing the line exhausted but upright. When no performance is recorded, no memory is built, and the race enters next season carrying only scale figures.

A third, more systemic risk: public funding. The Eastern Black Sea Development Agency, the ministry, and the provincial government are three separate sources. An event dependent on three public sources is stable while all three are favourable, and fragile when one changes direction. This is not a prediction that the race will stop; it is a note on a structural risk to track across budget seasons.

Finally, a communication risk. When an event is positioned as successful because of scale, the pressure next season is to grow scale. From two thousand to three thousand, from sixty to eighty countries. But sporting quality does not grow with scale. A race with three thousand people and no course record is still an unmeasured race. And when the only metric is scale, an event risks inflating without deepening.

Why this story is worth following

Kaçkar by UTMB sits in a long line of sports events designed as destination-branding tools. The model has brilliant precedents and failures alike. Chamonix became a globally recognised name thanks to one race, but it took decades and an exceptionally dense local running community behind it. Without that community, an imported brand stays an imported brand.

What draws my attention is not scale but the event's position in a longer schedule. The report mentions the Turkish President's presence in the region, MPs, the national women's volleyball team's successes, and the 2027 European Games. Those details do not sit side by side by accident. They show a continuous strategy around international hosting capacity, in which a trail race in Rize is one mesh of the net, not the whole net.

That is why I will keep tracking this event — but by a specific checklist rather than a feeling. Will the organiser publish the full distance menu and course records? Will the elite start list be made public? Will the sponsor group re-sign for a third edition? Will regional development funding survive the next budget cycle? And will a Turkish runner appear near the front of a UTMB World Series race within a few years?

Every time I pick up a microphone, I learn to be quieter inside my head — and that silence only has value if it is used to observe, not to fill gaps with praise. A start line with two thousand people is a strong image. But a strong image does not become memory on its own. Memory needs a name, a time, a moment when someone moved past their own limit.

When the stands are empty, the only applause left is your own. And when the results sheet is empty, the only thing left is what the organiser chooses to say about itself.

One thing I believe after years at the edge of sports events: the sports that are measured seriously are the ones that last. Trail running has an advantage many sports lack — it is tied to land, to mountains, to courses that cannot be replicated. It also has a critical weakness: because it cannot be measured easily, it is easy to tell wrongly. A race can be told as a festival, a tourism campaign, a national symbol, an economic opportunity — and all those tellings can coexist without a single second of sporting truth.

Kaçkar by UTMB's second edition has run. Two thousand people climbed those slopes. Among them, certainly, were people who prepared for months, who woke at four in the morning for final sessions, who turned down a party to sleep early, who stood at the start with a very private goal that nobody recorded. Their story exists. It just has not been told.

And if the third edition still has no results sheet, that is when a more serious question is due — not about how big the race is, but about who it is serving.