Kaçkar by UTMB: When a Mountain Trail Becomes a Tourism Ambassador

That morning on the Ayder plateau, above 1,300 metres in the Kaçkar range, nobody started a stopwatch for a record. A minister raised a hand, and two thousand runners from sixty countries moved into the fog. In athletics this is the strangest moment of the day: the largest event is the one where nobody, not even the organisers, can predict who finishes first. There is no qualifying time, no heat sheet by seconds, no benchmark to place beside a world list. The only certain fact is that a race has begun.

The gap on the course is a living thing, and it changes when someone dares to believe.

Kaçkar by UTMB is the second edition of the event. It sits inside the UTMB World Series, a commercial system whose summit is the Chamonix final, where entry comes not from running fast but from the lottery and from Running Stones collected at satellite races. This is a fundamental difference from the World Athletics system: no A standard, no B standard, no national ranking affected. The race director is Johan Essl, a UTMB official rather than a local figure — a small detail that says a great deal about who controls the technical standard.

The list behind the race deserves a slow read. Türkiye's Ministry of Youth and Sports, the Turkish Tourism Promotion and Development Agency, the Rize Governorship, and DOKA, the Eastern Black Sea Development Agency. At sponsor level sit Turkish Airlines, TOGG, Turkcell, Maxis — national champion brands. Minister Osman Aşkın Bak said plainly that sports tourism brings significant earnings to the country, and that ultra marathon runners command global followings. The Governor of Rize recalled the first edition, when fog and rain hid Mount Kaçkar. A 20-kilometre course was confirmed when sports officials ran it, indicating the event operates multiple distances rather than a single elite race.

UTMB Group runs something close to a brand monopoly in distance running, and Kaçkar by UTMB is a franchise node planted in new territory. What is sold is international legitimacy; what is bought is landscape, infrastructure and public money. The report names no elite runner, gives no finish time, no course record, no split analysis. The product being sold is not performance. It is presence.

From my own years watching distance races out of Nairobi and reporting from Sa Pa and Đà Lạt, I see three separate resources that very few countries hold at once. The first is athlete production. Kenya has it in surplus: Iten, Eldoret and Kaptagat turn out hundreds of sub-2:10 marathoners a year, yet Kenya hosts almost nothing at this scale, because it lacks the second resource. The second is organising capacity: moving two thousand people from sixty countries onto a plateau with rescue, medical cover, insurance, broadcast links, hotels and rights. Vietnam has done this at regional scale, but its elite bench is thin. The third is brand, and brand can be bought.

These three resources cannot substitute for one another, and most sports-policy mistakes begin with the assumption that owning one automatically delivers the others. Kenya has runners but lacks a stage. Vietnam has a regional stage but not yet a global marketplace. Türkiye has budget and brand, yet the report shows no athletes. The minister's comparison of Rize and Ayder to Davos confirms the goal is place-branding, not medal production.

Revenue here comes from entry fees, visitor nights, sponsorship and image value. The 20-kilometre course is the crucial piece: most participants pay to run short and middle distances, while the elite field serves as a media highlight. Because trail running has no ratified world records, sporting quality can only be measured by course records and elite depth. The source supplies neither.

The blind spot lies elsewhere, and it is weather. The Governor recalled that fog and rain hid the mountain in year one. The Black Sea mountains are wet year round, with rain arriving fast and visibility collapsing faster. For a mountain trail event this is the dominant operational risk, far beyond any concern about performance. Rain does not cancel the race immediately, but it destroys exactly what the race was built to sell: broadcast imagery. One line in the report deserves close reading — the images broadcast from here will be very beautiful. That sentence describes the real product.

So the metric for judging this kind of event is not the winner's finishing time, but the number of clear hours inside the main broadcast window. The second risk is financial structure: when the budget comes from a ministry, a regional development agency and a provincial authority, the event's survival depends on budget cycles rather than on entries. A race living on fees can die from too few customers; a race living on public money can die from a single struck-out line.

The gap on the course is a living thing, and it changes when someone dares to believe.

There is a paradox worth keeping. The claim that this gathering includes world-class athletes is formally true, because ultra running is a genuine global community. But in a report this long with not one athlete named, the sporting ranking of the event remains a blank cell. To me that does not devalue the race. It simply relocates its value: this is a milestone for sports tourism, not for elite athletics.

Next time I read a similar announcement, I will ask three verifying questions. First, are the start list and full results published. Second, what is the course record for each distance. Third, are the sponsorship contracts renewed for the following edition. Those three answers will say more than any opening speech about whether the event is growing or merely being staged.

The gap on the course is a living thing, and it changes when someone dares to believe. In Sa Pa or Đà Lạt, where public budgets are far thinner than those of a Turkish regional development agency, the same question hangs in the air: buy a brand to get sixty countries in one season, or build a course to get sixty countries in thirty years.