Kaçkar by UTMB Second Edition: Two Thousand Feet on the Mountain, and a Silence Nobody Names

On the morning of the start, on the Ayder plateau in Rize province, in Turkey's Eastern Black Sea region, Minister of Youth and Sports Osman Aşkın Bak fired the starting signal for the second edition of Kaçkar by UTMB. Two thousand runners from 60 countries poured down the slopes of the Kaçkar range. I followed the Anadolu Ajansı report from Nairobi, five thousand kilometres away. What stopped me was not the number two thousand. What stopped me was the absence: no winner's name, no finish time, no split.

I once spent years tracing old diaries in an African football federation's archive to recover names that had never been written down. At Kaçkar, the names were not lost under dust. They were never written in the first place. The stadium is empty, yet their voices still echo — a course does not need a grandstand to know where it belongs.

A node in a franchise system

Kaçkar by UTMB sits inside the UTMB World Series, the commercial mountain-running circuit operated by UTMB Group and centred on the Ultra-Trail du Mont-Blanc finals in Chamonix, France. It is a parallel ecosystem to World Athletics. It awards no Olympic places, uses no time standards, and recognises no world records.

Entry to the Mont-Blanc finals comes through Running Stones — points earned at qualifying races — combined with a lottery. Money and luck matter more than a clock reading. For a race only in its second edition, the draw is the UTMB-branded ticket, not the competitive standard of the course itself.

The event has a Race Director, Johan Essl, a figure from UTMB's central structure. The minister called Kaçkar part of the largest organisation in the world, and structurally that is accurate: by number of member races, UTMB is the largest mountain-running system on earth.

Why a mountain race cannot hold a record

For a ratified athletics record you need a measured course, controlled gradients, recorded wind, and certified timing. Trail running has none of these. Every mountain course is its own geographic entity, so competitive quality can only be judged through course records and elite-field depth.

The Anadolu Ajansı report supplies neither. We know there were two thousand runners from 60 countries. We do not know the winner, the longest distance, the cumulative elevation, or the cut-offs. That is not a reporter's failure. It is an editorial choice: the event is told as a tourism story, and in that story the fastest runner is a speck of colour in a wide shot.

Where the money and the power sit

Sponsorship says more than any speech. Turkish Airlines, TOGG, Turkcell and Maxis are national champion brands. This is a coalition of state and corporate leaders, with the flag carrier bringing foreigners in and the domestic EV brand attaching itself to a technology image.

The state side is just as crowded. The Ministry of Youth and Sports, the Türkiye Tourism Promotion and Development Agency, the Rize Governorship and DOKA, the Eastern Black Sea Development Agency, all sit behind the race. DOKA is a regional public financing body, and its involvement means regional development money anchors the event economically.

Minister Bak stated the goal plainly: sports tourism brings significant earnings to the country. He compared the ambition for Rize and Ayder to Davos. A mountain town becoming the name of an event type — that is place-branding through sport, and it is not hidden.

The same report mentions the national women's volleyball team's 2026 achievements and the 2027 European Games in Istanbul. The pieces form a line: a country building hosting capacity and sporting reputation across multiple formats.

Two formats, two opposing logics

Turkey's women's volleyball team is famous for winning. It has medals, names, and measurable proof that investing in female athletes pays. Kaçkar by UTMB is famous for being there. People come to run, climb, photograph, collect a medal, spend money in Ayder. Both are sport. Only one is performance.

I am not ranking them. A country needs both, and a mountain region needs international visitors more than it needs another final. What matters is that the difference is named correctly. Otherwise we grow used to loud sporting claims with no result line behind them.

Four thousand feet and a 20 km course

The report confirms a 20 km distance, run by two Anadolu Ajansı and AASK figures, Yusuf Özhan and Hasan Hüseyin Kul. UTMB World Series events usually offer multiple distances. We know there is a 20 km. We do not know what else exists.

Ayder sits at roughly 1,300 metres, and the Kaçkar range rises above 2,000 metres in places. Altitude is a real variable, and it has not been quantified. As someone who builds athlete profiles, I start with one question: what has this body been through. Without a course profile, that question cannot be answered. On the feet of two thousand runners that morning stood a generation of mountain athletes never named by their own times.

The risk is weather, not doping

The report contains no line on doping, mandatory kit, safety standards or eligibility disputes. That does not mean they do not exist. UTMB enforces mandatory equipment and medical checks, and breaches bring disqualification rather than doping sanctions. But the silence shows where the media focus sits.

The Rize Governor let the real risk slip: in the first edition, Kaçkar was hidden by fog and rain. That is the most important admission in the report. An event whose value lies in broadcast imagery — as he himself said, the images broadcast from here will be very beautiful — treats fog as a commercial problem, not just a weather one.

Public funding creates a second-order risk. When the anchor is regional development money and ministry budgets, the race's fate follows political and budget cycles.

The other side of a beautiful claim

Minister Bak said ultra marathon runners are world-class athletes with followers worldwide. That is true of the ultra world in general. It is not evidence about Kaçkar's field, because the report names no elite competitor.

There is a kind of sporting claim designed to be unfalsifiable: it borrows the prestige of a broad group to vouch for a specific event without naming an individual. A track meet can say it has a world champion, and we check in thirty seconds. A trail race can say it has world-class runners, and we wait for the start list.

The gap between those two sentences is the whole difference between competitive value and commercial value. The entire UTMB World Series runs on this logic: brand, experience, landscape, the medal around your neck after twenty hours. All of it is real. None of it is a result.

As a biographer of female athletes, I have one more unanswered question. Of two thousand runners, how many were women, how many ran the longest distance, and how was the course designed for them. Long-distance running is one of the few sports where women can compete directly with men at certain distances, because endurance and fuelling decide more than peak speed. A race with global ambition that publishes no gender data is leaving out half the story.

What to track

Start lists and results are the first test. Full results would raise Kaçkar's competitive credibility immediately and force this analysis to be revised. Then the distance menu and course records. Then budget and weather — DOKA's funding is the financial pillar, the Black Sea mountain climate the risk pillar. A race endures only if both hold for several seasons.

Closing

When a mountain region finds a way to put its name on the world map without anyone winning, that is both an achievement and a warning. The achievement is that two thousand people from 60 countries really did climb that mountain. The warning is that if we stop demanding results, a time will come when nobody remembers how fast anyone once ran up it.

I write biographies to pull back the invisible curtain that men's sport draws over women's sport. At Kaçkar that morning, the curtain covered everyone — men, women, the winner, the runner pulled at the third cut-off. The mountain is still there. It is only waiting for someone willing to write down the performances of the people who ran on it.