Kaçkar by UTMB Second Edition: 2,000 Runners, 60 Countries, and a Performance-Data Void

The Turkish Minister of Youth and Sports, Osman Aşkın Bak, fired the start. Behind him lay the Ayder plateau, where morning breath froze into white mist. Two thousand athletes from 60 countries waited on the start line of Kaçkar by UTMB, its second edition. I sat nearly six thousand kilometres away, in Nairobi, rewinding the short Anadolu news agency report and noting every verifiable detail. One line made me pause longer than the rest: the governor of Rize recalled that last year, fog and rain had hidden Kaçkar. A mountain race marketed through imagery, erased from the frame by the weather in its very first edition. That detail carries more weight than any praise in the bulletin.

Kaçkar by UTMB sits inside the UTMB World Series — the international trail-racing network run by UTMB Group in Chamonix, France. Entry to the Mont-Blanc finals does not come from a time standard, but from a lottery and Running Stones. That is the fundamental difference from road athletics: no qualifying marks, no national-team slots, no World Athletics ranking. This year's race is the second edition, set in the Kaçkar range and the Ayder plateau in Rize, in Turkey's eastern Black Sea region, terrain generally ranging from about 1,300 to over 2,000 metres. Race director Johan Essl was present — a sign that the central UTMB brand is involved directly rather than delegating everything to the local organiser.

The interesting part is the power structure behind the scenes. Backing the race are the Ministry of Youth and Sports, the Türkiye Tourism Promotion and Development Agency, the Rize Governorship and DOKA, the Eastern Black Sea Development Agency. Sponsors include Turkish Airlines, TOGG, Turkcell and Maxis. A mountain race underwritten by national-champion brands and regional public money. That structure says more than any press release: this is a sports-tourism product, not a talent-development platform.

And this is where I have to be blunt about the data. The report tells us the scale, not the performance. No winner's name, no finish times, no course records, no split statistics. A 20-kilometre course is confirmed only indirectly, through the fact that two staffers of the news agency and the Turkish athletics federation, Yusuf Özhan and Hasan Hüseyin Kul, ran that distance. The full distance menu is not stated. In trail running this matters more than it appears: the discipline has no ratified world records, so competitive quality can only be measured by two things — course records and the depth of the elite field. Both are absent.

A race can be a roaring success as a destination brand while leaving an almost total blank on the sporting side — and those are two entirely separate ledgers.

I do not read that absence as a reporter's mistake. It is the nature of sports-tourism journalism. The minister stated that ultra marathon runners are world-class athletes with fans around the planet. That is a rhetorical claim, not evidence. He also said sports tourism brings significant revenue to the country, and that he wants Ayder and Rize associated with major organisations the way Davos is associated with an economic forum. At 61, I have learned that sport never grows old; only our way of looking at it wears thin. What has worn thin here is the habit of reading a crowd-size bulletin and believing we are reading a performance report.

Push the argument one step further and UTMB's franchise system works on logic very close to the football transfer market: the brand holder collects fees and controls the distribution of value, while the local host carries the infrastructure, the budget and the weather risk. The athletes — the people who produce everything worth watching — appear in no accounting line at all. I once stood in the middle of the 2026 World Cup and saw only one thing: prejudice. Then I counted pass after pass to erase it. Here, what I am counting is what goes untold: how many local Rize runners took part, how many women were among the two thousand starters, what the prize money was for the leading group. Not one line.

There is a reverse reading worth considering. Tourism revenue, sponsored flights, upgraded infrastructure, a highland town known globally — those things are real. A mountain race drawing 2,000 people in its second edition is real organisational capacity. But whether it lasts depends on what goes unmentioned: whether DOKA's and the ministry's public budgets survive political cycles, and whether a second-year fog swallows the frame again. The sporting world always wants rankings. I only want to understand why they run, why they cry. With Kaçkar, I have not been given a single tool to understand that.

From Nairobi, my experience following trail races across many seasons has taught me one thing: the true value of a mountain race is not measured by entries, but by how many people train around it at six in the morning on a weekday. The small girl with worn shoes does not appear in any report, yet I have seen her in every figure. If three years from now the Kaçkar start list carries a name born in Rize, and the results sheet carries finish times and a course record, the conversation will be different. For now, the things to track are concrete: the elite start list, the full distance menu, the sponsorship renewal cycle and the published budget lines. Because a course only truly exists when we can name the people who ran it.