Kackar by UTMB: 2,000 Runners, 60 Countries, and a Gap Nobody Wants to Measure

Early on the morning of the start, Turkey's Minister of Youth and Sports, Osman Aşkın Bak, sounded the horn on the Ayder Plateau in Rize, in the Eastern Black Sea region, and two thousand pairs of shoes began to pour down the rocky slopes of the Kaçkar range. It was the opening moment of Kaçkar by UTMB, the second edition of this trail race. Two thousand athletes, from sixty countries. A number large enough that every news bulletin wants to stand right there and cheer.

But when I read the entire press release again, from the first line to the last, something strange emerged: not a single time split. No winner's name. No course record. Nobody named for having run faster than the rest. If you read carefully, there is a sports event there — very crowded, very international, very well attended by dignitaries — but the competition section is empty. And that emptiness is not an accident. It is a choice.

I once thought I came to commentate a race. It turns out I came to listen to how people describe it.

Context: a race inside an ecosystem that does not use records as a yardstick

To understand why a mountain race can have two thousand people and sixty countries without publishing times, you need to know what UTMB is. UTMB — Ultra-Trail du Mont-Blanc — began in Chamonix, France, and has become an almost monopolistic brand in global ultra-trail running. They operate a system called the UTMB World Series: a network of satellite races in many countries, each a node, with the final destination being the finals in Chamonix.

The key point sits here: trail running has no ratified world record. There is no single standard number anyone can compare, because every course has different gradients, altitude, weather and surfaces. Performance here is relative — relative to that course, on that day. And a ticket to Chamonix is not won by hitting a time standard but by a lottery system plus points called Running Stones, accumulated across satellite races.

Kaçkar by UTMB sits inside that network. The presence of Race Director Johan Essl shows this is not a spontaneous local race but an official node in the global chain. The organizing coalition includes the Ministry of Youth and Sports, the Türkiye Tourism Promotion and Development Agency, the Rize Governorship, and the Eastern Black Sea Development Agency (DOKA). Sponsors include Turkish Airlines, TOGG, Turkcell, and Maxis — all national brands. This is not the structure of a small race.

On the course, the source clearly confirms a 20-kilometre distance, which officials ran for testing. That implies multiple distance categories, typical of UTMB races, but the full menu is not published. The Kaçkar region and Ayder Plateau sit at roughly 1,300 to over 2,000 metres, meaning mountain terrain and altitude are real variables. There is no course profile, no cumulative elevation, no cut-off times. All I have is geography.

Core: this is a sports-tourism event, not a measured race

The most interesting part of this story is not the course but the organizational structure behind it. When a race has a minister, a governor, a regional development agency, and national corporations standing together, what is being built is not merely a race. It is a local promotional machine, and the sport is the vehicle.

Minister Bak says this implicitly: he compares the ambition for Ayder and Rize to the way Davos is associated with economic forums. He also says sports tourism provides significant earnings to the country, and that the images broadcast from here will be very beautiful. He recalls that ultra marathon runners are world-class people with followers worldwide.

Here I want to pause, because I have sat at enough commentary desks to recognize when a sentence is a description and when it is a slogan. The phrase "world-class athletes" is rhetorical, not evidentiary. Nobody in the release is named as a title contender. The two people specifically named on the 20-kilometre course are Anadolu Agency figures — participants, not contenders. That distinction matters.

The United States, France, Italy and Spain have very deep trail-running talent pools. At a race like this, you can read quality from the start list and the results. At Kaçkar, we have scale, not measured depth. Two thousand people is a sign of good organization. It is not a sign of high competitive standard. Those are two different stories, and the bulletin chose the first.

There is another reading, and I find it more convincing. A satellite trail race can survive without anyone remembering the times, because its value is not in the result. Its value is in presence. Sixty countries means sixty potential advertising markets, sixty groups of people who can come to Rize, stay, eat, fly Turkish Airlines, and take home a clip of mountains and forest. From that angle, whether the winner's time is published barely affects the real objective.

I don't say that as an automatic criticism. A poor mountain region needs income, and an elite race with global media is a reasonable way to earn it. What I say is: readers need to know what they are watching. This is sports tourism, carefully packaged. It is not proof that Turkey is producing top trail runners. Across the entire release, not a single Turkish trail athlete is named as a performance figure.

Every time I pick up the mic, I learn to be quieter inside my own head.

Contrarian: the biggest risk is the one mentioned most lightly

There is one detail in the speeches I read over and over. The Governor recalls that last year, Kaçkar was hidden by fog and rain. He says it like a fond memory, something memorable. But seen through operational eyes, that is an alarm signal.

A mountain trail race in a Black Sea climate depends on weather more than any road race. Dense fog can ground helicopters, ruin broadcast imagery, and — more seriously — complicate resupply, first aid and evacuation. If the whole point of the event is to produce beautiful mountain images to broadcast worldwide, then rain and fog directly destroy that very goal.

Turkey's promotional value is tied to beautiful imagery. When clouds cover Kaçkar, what remains in the media's eye is a race in fog. Add to that the mandatory safety measures — personal kit, medical checks, alternate courses and cancellation protocols — all implied but none stated in the source. For a mountain region, that is not a minor detail. That is the lifeblood of the whole event.

Another point is placed too lightly. Funding comes from public budgets and the regional development agency. A race can be killed not only by bad weather, but by shifting budget lines. Kaçkar by UTMB is only in its second edition. In the brand-building phase, everything glitters, but the financial base still rests on political will. If I were reading the economic results of this race, I would track sponsor renewal cycles and budget lines, not opening speeches.

I don't deny what the release gets right. This race has a genuine strength: it turns a remote region into a named destination on the global running map, and does so in only two years. But that success lies in infrastructure and organization, not in performance. And once we talk about performance, I will wait for start lists, results, full distances and course records. Only then is there something to analyze.

A record is only an excuse to remember a person, not a number.

Why that gap matters to Vietnamese readers

I write this for a specific concern. In Vietnam, mountain and trail races are also surging, from Sa Pa to Da Lat, from Vung Tau to the eastern Central Highlands. Many of them are walking exactly the road Kaçkar just walked in two years: organizers standing beside tourism agencies and large corporations, while the results section is, at times, fainter than the imagery.

I don't say this as a warning. I say it as an invitation to read more carefully. When a report about a race tells you two thousand people and sixty countries, that is a signal about organization. When that report does not tell you who won, that is a signal about priorities. Both signals are true, both are needed for a full picture, but only one of them reaches you.

A mature sports culture does not only need many starters. It needs the winner, and a system that records the journey they took to hand to the next generation. Trail running makes this hard because every course is its own world. But precisely because it is hard, it needs to be done. No course record published after a race this crowded, to me, is more worth discussing than sixty countries.

There is something more durable than titles: the way others remember how you played. At Kaçkar, nobody has yet been remembered for how they ran.

Takeaway

One start horn, two thousand people, sixty countries, a mountain region that needs promoting. Turkey did the hardest part very well: gathering crowds and building a local brand in two years. The rest — being read closely, measured, remembered — is still waiting. The difference between an event and a collective belief is sometimes pointed out by one simple question: what was the name of the fastest runner that day? So far, that question has no answer. And the one to answer it will be the organizers, in the third edition.