Kaçkar by UTMB Second Edition: Two Thousand Runners, Not a Single Result

The clock struck the start in Ayder, a plateau in Rize province in Turkey's Eastern Black Sea region. Minister of Youth and Sports Osman Aşkın Bak fired the starting signal. Two thousand runners from sixty countries charged up the slopes of Mount Kaçkar. The crowd was large enough to fill a mountain trail and every frame the national broadcaster aired that evening.

I stayed behind after the broadcast, reopened the organizers' information pack, and read it from the first line to the last. There were participant numbers. There were country numbers. There was the distance of one course. There was no finishing time for anyone. No winner. No course record. To someone who has spent forty-five years reading athletics result sheets, a two-thousand-person race without a single performance figure is not a race. It is a media event wearing a competition's clothing.

That does not make it worthless. It only means we should call what we are looking at by its proper name.

Kaçkar by UTMB sits inside the UTMB World Series, the commercial trail-running network run by UTMB Group in Chamonix, France. To be clear: this is not the Olympic system, nor is it a World Athletics ranking event. Entry to the Mont-Blanc finals does not come from beating a time standard; it comes from Running Stones earned at satellite races, then a lottery. A race whose ticket is decided by probability rather than a stopwatch has already redefined performance on its own terms.

The organizers named Race Director Johan Essl, a UTMB official. That presence matters more than it appears. It confirms the parent brand stands directly behind the event rather than merely licensing a local organizing committee. The sponsor list reads nothing like an ordinary mountain race either: Turkish Airlines, TOGG, Turkcell, Maxis. These are national-champion brands, not regional backers.

Then I looked at the front row and saw the real story. The Ministry of Youth and Sports, the Turkish Tourism Promotion and Development Agency, the Rize Governorship, and DOKA — the Eastern Black Sea Development Agency — stood in the same line. Four public institutions, one event. When public money is the economic anchor, the goal is no longer medals. The goal is footfall.

And the footfall is real. The national carrier flew people in. Hotels in Ayder sold out. Riverside restaurants emptied their kitchens over three days. The minister said plainly what every tourism board thinks but rarely says aloud: sports tourism brings significant earnings to the country. He even compared Ayder and Rize to Davos — a place the world associates with an economic forum. The metaphor is precise to the point of being naked. Davos is not famous for having the best athletes. Davos is famous for having the most powerful people. What is being built here is not a track-and-field training hub but a place brand.

I recognized the model, only with different paint. In Kenya, where I report on athletics, training camps in Iten and Eldoret also pull in foreigners. But what they sell is the ability to produce named runners with recorded, comparable, repeatable times. Kaçkar sells the mountain. And a mountain does not need a results sheet.

That is why the 20-kilometer course run by two representatives of the news agency and the Turkish sports federation was named so clearly in the report. They are the only names recorded on a competition day. But they are not competitors. They are participants. In the language of sports journalism, that distinction is everything.

Here I have to stop where most reports do not.

The claim that "ultra marathon runners are world-class athletes with followers worldwide" is not data. It is a slogan. I do not say that to diminish anyone who ran. Covering 20 or 100 kilometers on Kaçkar's slopes, at points above 2,000 meters, in the cold and humidity of the Black Sea climate, is a real effort. But effort does not equal verified competitive quality. Without an elite start list, a winning time, or a course record, no one — not me, not the organizers — has grounds to say how strong this field was.

Worse, there is an operational risk the officials themselves acknowledged. The Rize Governor recalled that in the first edition, fog and rain hid Mount Kaçkar. For an event whose main value lies in broadcast imagery — "the images broadcast from here will be very beautiful" — the mountain failing to appear on screen is not a weather story. It is a business story. Black Sea mountain climate is the event's highest-tier risk, and no contingency was disclosed.

There is one more layer no one in the press room asked about. Of those sixty countries, what share were women? Of those two thousand runners, who was the first woman to finish, and in what time? When an organizer chooses not to publish detailed results, the people erased from the story first are always women. That is not speculation. It is a pattern I have recorded for years: without gender-disaggregated data, women's performances vanish from memory while men's are remembered by name.

I once stood at the 2026 World Cup and saw only one thing: prejudice. Then I counted every pass to erase it. At Kaçkar, I had nothing to count. And that void itself is the information.

I should be fair to Turkey on one point. A second-edition trail event drawing 2,000 people from 60 countries is a genuine organizing achievement, not a bubble. The UTMB network has pulling power a self-started local race lacks. And as the country builds toward the 2027 European Games, accumulating international event-operations experience is a sensible, calculated step rather than improvised showmanship.

But I want to keep professional distance here. An event can succeed at tourism and fail at sport at the same time. A crowd of 2,000 can signal a big brand, or a discipline where entry is easier than having your name written down. To know which side you are on, you need only one thing: a results sheet with names, times, and both genders.

When numbers can speak names, the whole field must listen. At Kaçkar this year, the numbers could count heads but could not read a single name. The sports world always wants rankings. I only want to understand why they run, why they cry — but to understand, you first need a name to start from.

At 61, I have learned that sport never gets old; only our way of looking at it wears out. Building a mountain race to sell scenery is an old idea. What would be new is the day the organizers decide to print the full results and let the mountain speak for them.