Kaçkar by UTMB: When a Mountain Race Becomes the Black Sea Region's Brand Ambassador

Kaçkar by UTMB: When a Mountain Race Becomes the Black Sea Region's Brand Ambassador

A news report that begins with the pressing of a button

On the Ayder plateau, where the altitude touches 1,300 metres and the Kaçkar valleys spill down toward the Black Sea, a button was pressed. The person pressing it was not the race referee but Türkiye's Minister of Youth and Sports, Osman Aşkın Bak. Behind him, 2,000 runners from 60 countries waited for the gun at the second edition of Kaçkar by UTMB.

That is almost the whole of what the report carried. On the 20-kilometre course, two Anadolu Agency journalists, Yusuf Özhan and Hasan Hüseyin Kul, also ran. A minister pressed a button, two reporters raced, two thousand people came from sixty countries. Not one winner's name. Not one split. Not one results table.

Nearly thirty years of writing about athletics taught me something uncomfortable: when a report stops right at the starting line, the real story lies somewhere else — not on the course.

UTMB operates as an ecosystem, not as a single race

The Ultra-Trail du Mont-Blanc was born in Chamonix, France, and grew into a global commercial system. At its centre sits the Mont-Blanc final, the destination every trail on earth wants to lead to. Around it sits the UTMB World Series, a network of licensed satellite races, of which Kaçkar by UTMB is one node in Türkiye's Eastern Black Sea region. Race Director Johan Essl, a UTMB official, was present in Ayder, and that presence alone confirms this is an official node rather than a self-started local race.

The entry mechanism is entirely different from road athletics. A place in Chamonix does not come from a time standard. It comes from a lottery and from "Running Stones" — credits earned at qualifying races. A recreational runner in Da Nang, patient enough across several seasons, could stand on the same start line as the world's best mountain runners. That is the system's greatest appeal, and also what makes it hard to judge through the eyes of a traditional athletics journalist.

Minister Osman Aşkın Bak called UTMB "part of the largest organisation in the world" in this sport. On brand terms, that is not wrong. UTMB dominates the international trail market through brand power rather than administrative authority. It does not legislate, but it does set prestige.

There is one technical point outsiders often miss: trail running has no ratified world records. No body certifies a time set on a mountain, because every course has its own altitude, gradient, surface and weather. A mountain performance only means something in relation to the course that produced it. To judge the sporting quality of a trail race you must look at two things: course records and the depth of the elite field. The Kaçkar report supplies neither.

Geographically, this is a landscape both harsh and beautiful. Rize sits in Türkiye's north-east on the Black Sea, known for tea and rain. The Ayder plateau lies at roughly 1,300 metres, with the Kaçkar range rising above it past 3,000 metres. It is the kind of terrain any trail organiser dreams of: steep enough, scenic enough, and severe enough in climate to give a race a personality.

Three layers of organisation and a twenty-kilometre course

What stands out most about Kaçkar by UTMB is the power structure behind it. Three layers co-organise it.

The first is the state: 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 body that channels capital into local development projects. A development agency backing a mountain race shows that, from the outset, this was designed as soft infrastructure, not merely as a sporting event.

The second is business. Turkish Airlines, TOGG, Turkcell and Maxis sponsor it. Note the composition: a national carrier, a national electric-vehicle maker, the country's largest telecoms operator and a services brand. That is the sponsor roster of a national-scale event, not a grassroots race.

The third is the international UTMB brand, carrying with it technical, safety and communications standards.

Together these layers form a machine with a clear function: turning a little-known place into a name on the world running map. And the machine has run for two seasons. The second edition, according to the report, drew 2,000 runners from 60 countries.

The only confirmed technical detail is the 20-kilometre course the two Anadolu journalists ran. Based on my experience following UTMB World Series events, I can reasonably infer that Kaçkar by UTMB operates several distances in parallel — typically a short course around 20 km for newcomers, a mid distance and an ultra. But that is a conditional inference, because the report does not publish the full distance menu. When a race does not disclose its distances, readers cannot tell whether they are looking at a running festival or a genuine mountain race.

What is actually being sold at Ayder

One ministerial sentence I read several times opens up the whole logic: "We want to associate Ayder and Rize with organisations like this, the way Davos is associated with economic forums."

The comparison is not improvised. Davos is a small Alpine town in Switzerland that hosts the World Economic Forum. Within a few decades the name Davos became a global brand of power, even though the town itself manufactures nothing remarkable. Rize is aiming at a similar position in the world of trail running.

Kaçkar by UTMB's main export is not sporting performance. It is the image of a place.

Strung together, the mechanism runs along a three-stage pipeline. Upstream: local organisational capacity, transport infrastructure and public money, plus the UTMB licence. Midstream: the race itself, funded by national sponsors. Downstream: international visitors, accommodation, food, transport, and above all the image value accumulated season by season.

The minister says it plainly: "Sports tourism provides significant earnings to the country." There is nothing suspicious there. It is a perfectly rational strategy for a country with terrain advantages and tourism infrastructure. What is worth discussing is what we call it.

From an athletics standpoint, something interesting emerges. For more than a century, nations used running tracks to produce medals. In this model, people use medals — or more precisely the presence of international runners — to produce places. That is a reversal of purpose. Image business comes before performance improvement.

And it works. A second edition drawing two thousand people from sixty countries is a figure many veteran national athletics championships in Asia can only dream of.

Public money is the anchor

One detail I do not want to skip: the presence of DOKA. A regional development agency means public budget is the load-bearing beam of the whole event.

That brings two consequences. On the positive side, it lets the race survive the fragile start-up phase, when a mountain event usually needs three to five seasons before registration fees and commercial sponsorship can carry it. On the risk side, continuity depends on budget and political cycles. A public project can be cut when national priorities shift.

As an observer, I always ask the same question of such models: if the public money stops, what remains? For Kaçkar by UTMB, the answer lies in the brand. Once the name sits inside the UTMB World Series and runners from 60 countries have formed the habit of entering the lottery each year, the event begins to hold value independent of public funding. That is the line every new race tries to cross.

Alongside public money sits corporate sponsorship. Turkish Airlines does not simply place a logo. A national carrier sponsoring a mountain race in a remote region usually implies participation in the international transport chain: fly to Istanbul, connect to Rize or Trabzon, then travel by road up to Ayder. It is the familiar playbook of national tourism boards: turning sport into a segment of an air route.

When weather is the largest shareholder

One passage made me pause longer than any other. The Governor of Rize recalled that in the first edition, Kaçkar was completely hidden by fog and rain.

This is the most operationally important detail, and the least noticed.

The Black Sea mountain climate is severe: heavy rain, high humidity, fog that appears quickly and blankets an entire valley within minutes. For a mountain race, weather is a life-and-death variable. It determines runner safety, whether the course must be rerouted or shortened, and the feasibility of cut-off times — which every trail organiser must set to ensure nobody is left on the mountain after dark.

For an event whose value lies in imagery, bad weather is a double loss: it threatens safety and wipes out an entire year of communications assets.

The minister said the "images broadcast from here will be very beautiful". That is true, and it is exactly why the fog that hid the first edition was a bigger loss than it appears. A race without beautiful images barely exists in the attention economy.

In the same vein, the minister mentioned that "all trails have cameras for taking and sharing photos". That detail carries safety meaning — monitoring, tracking, rescue support — and promotional meaning. In modern trail events the two functions have merged. A camera on the trail is both a monitoring device and a content factory.

On the regulatory side, a UTMB-system race typically operates under its own standards: mandatory kit lists, medical checks, cut-offs, tracking systems. Breaching those rules leads to disqualification rather than doping sanctions. For a mass event of two thousand people, doping exposure is far lower than in road races chasing records. The report raises no doping issue, and I record that as neutral — no risk flag, and no reassurance either.

What the report does not say

This is the part that kept me sitting longest.

A report about a race, by professional standards, needs at least four things: the winner, finishing times, a course profile and a few facts about the elite field. This report has none of the four.

I am not saying this to diminish the event. I am saying it to separate two entirely different kinds of information. A political-sports report, centred on official statements, has its own logic. It has no obligation to provide results, and it does not target readers who want to know who ran faster. But sports readers should know which kind of report they are reading.

When the minister speaks of "ultra marathon runners who are world-class athletes with followers worldwide", that is rhetorical framing. Not one elite runner is named anywhere in the report. The elite field may genuinely be present in Ayder — quite possibly, since Running Stones chasers regularly attend satellite races. But possibility is not evidence.

Trail running has no world records, so a record is only a shadow; the human being is the course. In this report, the human part has not yet been drawn. I know how many runners started. I do not know who any of them are.

Eighteen hundred pages and a race near Sa Pa

In 2026, aged 35, I skipped the prize ceremony at a marathon in Da Nang to follow a 23-year-old cross-country runner named Lê Văn Tuấn back to Lien Chieu district. He finished ninth, without a medal. He trained on sand in shoes with worn-out soles. And he had kept a running diary for five years, more than 1,800 pages thick.

I wrote a 2,500-word piece called "The Endurance Runner Who Needs No Finish Line". It was shared more than 12,000 times. The following year, Tuấn won the national title.

I tell this story not to compare two sporting nations, but to show two different roads leading to one point. Türkiye bought a global brand node, built a two-thousand-person event by its second edition, and sold Rize's image to the world. Vietnam had a young man writing 1,800 pages nobody knew about, until a journalist happened to follow him home.

Both are stories about endurance. But they operate in entirely different frames of reference.

In Vietnam, trail running has taken root. The mountain race in Sa Pa has existed for more than a decade and become a familiar international meeting point. Trail events in the northern mountains draw thousands of runners each season, with a significant share of international visitors. But no Vietnamese node yet sits inside the UTMB World Series. That gap is worth thinking about, because it is both an opportunity and a sign of limits in organisational capacity and safety standards.

What is interesting is that at the level of human stories, we are not short of anything. There are runners who never reach the finish, yet keep running forever in my memory. What we lack sits at the level of infrastructure and institutions, not at the level of will.

A counter-intuitive angle: are we learning the wrong lesson?

There are two ways to react to the Kaçkar by UTMB model, and both are wrong in different ways.

The first is contempt. Many in professional athletics would say: this race has no results, no records, no national selection, so what is there to discuss. That stance is professional arrogance. Football has long sold national brands. Athletics has every right to do the same. Two thousand people from sixty countries paying to run on a mountainside is a real organisational achievement, not a stunt. Dismissing it because it produces no medals ignores the entire economy standing behind the sport.

The second is mechanical imitation. This is the real risk for developing sporting nations. Seeing a race with two thousand runners, a minister pressing a button and a national airline as sponsor, then concluding that buying an international brand licence will produce sports tourism. That ignores a dry fact: beneath the beautiful photographs sits a system of technical standards covering safety, rescue, medical care, tracking, cut-offs and weather contingency. A race that wants to enter the UTMB World Series must meet those standards before it earns reputation.

Athletics and human life are alike in one respect: everyone has a finish line, but few run the right course.

If Vietnam secures a UTMB World Series node without a domestic elite field strong enough to contest the top placings, we will own a very beautiful playground for other people. The flag may fly over the start gate, but the results sheet will speak a different language. Conversely, if we only build elite runners without building international event-organising capacity, we will keep exporting good stories for others to tell.

The line between those two is thinner than people think. It comes down to this: does a locality learn to put its own name on a global system, or does it only learn to pay for the global system to pass through?

What I take home from Kaçkar

Looking at the whole picture, the most thought-provoking thing is not the number two thousand or sixty. It is the gap between image and data.

The Turks have done the storytelling part very well. They have the mountain, the fog, the tea, a global brand behind them, and a minister willing to press the start button. What is missing is the part only people who write inside the sport notice: a results table, a name, a split time, a training diary belonging to someone who ran 100 kilometres through the night. Those will come. The third edition will have a first finisher with a recorded time, and only then will this story begin to have a spine.

For me, my heroes never lift a trophy; they only whisper to the grass of the arena. In Ayder the grass grows short and cold. If someone among those two thousand is running with a diary in their pack, or with shoes worn down beyond reason, that person is the most important thing to write about from the Black Sea this season. The organisers may not have recorded their name yet. But sooner or later, somebody will have to follow them home.

Vietnam should ask itself one question before preparing any hosting dossier: thirty years from now, what do we want people to remember Sa Pa for — a race inside a global system, or a Vietnamese runner standing on the highest step of that system?