Kaçkar by UTMB, Second Edition: 2,000 Runners, 60 Countries, and Not a Single Mark Published

On the Ayder plateau, a minister ran 20 kilometres. Four hours later, a press release went out to newsrooms: 2,000 athletes, 60 countries, second edition. Not one line about who won. Not one line about finish times. Not one line about how long the main course actually was. I read that release three times. The first time to look for numbers. The second to look for names. The third to confirm that neither existed. The strangest thing is never the error — it is the way people try to explain it. A 2,000-runner ultra-trail event crosses a mountain range, and the only thing recorded is how many people and how many countries. It is like reporting a football match by describing the stands and never mentioning the score. For me this is a familiar calculation. I always ask: where did this money come from, what did it do along the way, and whose pocket did it end up in? At Kaçkar by UTMB, that question has a far clearer answer than the question of who ran fastest. Kaçkar by UTMB is a stop on the UTMB World Series — the commercial trail circuit operated by UTMB Group, the body behind Ultra-Trail du Mont-Blanc in Chamonix, France. Its structure differs fundamentally from anything governed by World Athletics. No qualifying standards. No national-team selection. No Olympic ranking. Places at the Chamonix final are allocated by lottery and by “Running Stones” — points accumulated at qualifying races. This season is the second edition. The location: Ayder, Rize province, in eastern Turkey's Black Sea region. Local elevation sits between roughly 1,300 and 2,000 metres. The race director is Johan Essl, a UTMB man — an important detail, because it shows this is an official branch of the brand, not a self-organised local race. The sponsor list deserves slow reading: Turkish Airlines, TOGG, Turkcell, Maxis. On the state side: the Ministry of Youth and Sports, the Türkiye Tourism Promotion and Development Agency, the Rize Governorship, and DOKA — the Eastern Black Sea Development Agency. Eight names, two centres of power, one event. First layer: who pays. The Ministry of Youth and Sports holds the lead role. DOKA — a regional development fund — sits inside the sponsorship structure. The Rize Governorship coordinates. All three are public money. No contribution breakdown has been published, but the structure is already visible: an international mountain trail race cannot stand on the entry fees of 2,000 runners alone. There is no speculation here. It is simple subtraction. Staging a trail race to UTMB technical standards — medical cover, rescue, cut-offs, GPS tracking, mountain logistics — costs far more than registration revenue brings in. The shortfall comes from public budgets and corporate sponsorship. I am not accusing anyone. I am only counting how many lines were never written into the ledger. Second layer: where the money goes. Turkish Airlines sponsors a race with runners from 60 countries. Side by side, those two facts cannot be separated. A national carrier sponsoring an event manufactures international demand to fly into a regional airport. TOGG, Turkcell, Maxis — three domestic brands standing together at a local race. The conversion mechanism here is destination marketing. Third layer: who captures the value. Minister Osman Aşkın Bak stated the goal plainly: he wants Ayder and Rize associated with major organisations, “just as Davos is associated with economic forums.” He also said sports tourism brings significant earnings to the country. That is a strategic statement, made publicly, and it positions the entire event: the main product is image, not a results sheet. What does UTMB Group get? A new node on its brand map, in a geography that was previously empty. In exchange, the UTMB name turns a regional race into a “60-country” event. Most of those 60 were produced by brand equity, not by the course. Turkey has no elite trail tradition yet. The report names not a single home athlete. A country hosting an international race without a single domestic face mentioned is the signature of an event-import market, not a rising sporting nation. The 2027 European Games in Istanbul are being mentioned as a landmark. Kaçkar sits inside that hosting-capability pipeline. That is inference, not a published fact. And this is where the competitive data becomes the largest gap of all. I have followed trail running long enough to know one thing: the sport has no ratified world records. A performance only means something when tied to a specific course. To judge a race's quality you need three things — a course record, the depth of the elite field, and a course profile. The report supplies exactly one technical fact: a 20-kilometre course, run by officials. The other distances are not listed. There is no elevation profile. No cut-off times. Not a single elite athlete named. In other words, 2,000 people ran, and none of them exists in the report as an individual competitor. The only people named as runners are two staff members of the news agency and the organiser. Those are participation facts, not performance indicators. Confusing the two is the most basic error in this trade. The biggest operational risk is weather. The Rize Governor recalled that in the first edition, Kaçkar was hidden by fog and rain. The Black Sea mountains have a harsh, humid climate. A mountain trail race with 2,000 people depends on visibility. And the event's promotional value depends directly on the images it broadcasts. The minister said the footage sent from here would be beautiful. Fog does not read press releases. There is a reasonable side I must concede, and I will say it before anyone reminds me. First, mass-participation races do not operate on results-sheet logic. Two thousand people paying to run across a mountain do not need a champion to find the trip meaningful. For them, the result is a photograph at a pass. That is a legitimate product. Second, governments using sport to promote a region is not unusual. Many countries do it, and do it well. Ireland, Slovenia and New Zealand have all built destination brands through outdoor events. Third, the UTMB World Series franchise model is transparent in principle: a local race buys the right to use the brand and receives an inflow of international runners in return. There is no indication of fraud in that structure, and I will not construct a file that does not exist. What I am demanding is not an indictment. I am demanding a results sheet. There are three dots worth tracking over the next twelve months. First, whether start lists and elite results are published. Second, whether the full distance menu and course records appear in the regulations. Third, whether sponsors renew for a third edition — and whether DOKA's budget line is disclosed. All I do is connect the dots — and count how many people deliberately draw them wrong. At Kaçkar, no dot has been drawn wrong yet. A few simply have not been placed. People tell me I exaggerate; I tell them to wait a few more years. If the third edition arrives with a full results sheet, I will be the first to write that the race has grown up. If it does not, the product being sold in Ayder remains a photograph — and a photograph does not need a finish time.