Kaçkar by UTMB: Two Thousand Footsteps, Sixty Countries, and the Trade-Off of Sport

The Ayder Plateau sits at more than 1,300 metres, in the Çamlıhemşin district of Rize province, in Turkey's Eastern Black Sea region. On the morning of the second edition of the Kaçkar by UTMB mountain race, fog covered the valley. Local wooden roofs flickered in and out of the mist, and beneath the Kaçkar range — Turkey's fourth-highest mountain chain — two thousand runners from sixty countries stood waiting for the start signal.

The Minister of Youth and Sports of Turkey, Osman Aşkın Bak, gave that signal. He stood before the crowd and spoke of athletes of "world-class calibre", of feet that had conquered countless trails, of an event that was "part of the largest organisation in the world". Elsewhere on the plateau, locals and tourists queued to take photos, to buy souvenirs, to eat mountain specialities.

I sat for a long time on a stone step at the edge of the start square, listening. What held my attention was not the figure two thousand, nor the figure sixty. What held my attention was the gap between those two figures: in everything released to the press that day, there was not a single result, not one individual mark, not one split time for any athlete at all. People spoke of presence, not of finishing order. People spoke of scale, not of the quality of the course.

That is why I chose to write about this event — not because it is a big race, but because the way it is told reveals a model now repeating across the world, and one that will soon repeat in Southeast Asia.

Context: One Trail, One Ecosystem, and an Open Ledger

To readers who follow football, the term "UTMB" may still be unfamiliar. To the running world, those three letters are an empire.

UTMB stands for Ultra-Trail du Mont-Blanc, a trail event rooted in the French town of Chamonix, circling the Mont-Blanc massif where the borders of France, Italy and Switzerland meet. From a single race in the early 2000s, it grew into a brand operating what it calls the "UTMB World Series" — a chain of satellite races across five continents, granting access to the finals in Chamonix.

The essential mechanism to understand here is this: UTMB does not grant entry based on performance standards, but on an accumulation system called "Running Stones" — virtual pebbles that runners gather across qualifying races. Run more races in the system, collect more "stones", and those stones act as weights in the lottery that takes you to Chamonix. There is no performance benchmark. There is no absolute time threshold. There is a lottery system dressed up as a sport.

This is the detail I consider most important in the entire Kaçkar story.

Once finals entry is distributed by lottery rather than by standard, the incentives of the whole system shift. Athletes no longer compete to reach an absolute mark; they compete to accumulate presence. Satellite races no longer compete on course quality; they compete on the number of slots they are granted. And host localities — such as Rize — no longer sell a sporting arena; they buy a ticket into a global promotional ecosystem.

At Kaçkar, that ecosystem was visible in the signs around the start square. The event's sponsors included Turkish Airlines — the national carrier; TOGG — the domestic electric carmaker; Turkcell — the country's largest telecoms operator; and Maxis. This is not the sponsor list of a local trail race. This is a line-up of national champion brands. A mountain race only mobilises Turkish Airlines if it is positioned not as a race but as a national campaign.

Behind it stands an entire institutional coalition. Beyond the Ministry of Youth and Sports, there is the Türkiye Tourism Promotion and Development Agency, the Governorship of Rize, and DOKA — the Eastern Black Sea Development Agency. DOKA's presence is the detail worth pausing on longest. DOKA is a public financing institution, allocating development budgets to the region. For a regional development agency to fund a mountain race is not a sporting act. It is an act of soft-infrastructure investment: using public money to anchor an event, to anchor a flow of international visitors, to anchor the image of a place.

That is why I call Kaçkar an open ledger.

Core: When a Footprint Is Priced as an Invoice

To see the mechanism clearly, I will separate this event into four layers stacked on top of one another: the sponsor layer, the public-institution layer, the UTMB brand layer, and the athlete layer. All four are present at once, but only one of them actually brings money home.

The sponsor layer. Turkish Airlines does not sponsor Kaçkar out of a love of trail running. It sponsors because sixty countries mean sixty countries that might buy a ticket to Turkey. In airline logic, an international race is a demand-generation machine — and for a country positioned as a bridge between Europe and Asia, flying people to the Eastern Black Sea and out through Istanbul hits two targets with one arrow. TOGG sponsors because it sees a chance for a domestic electric brand to attach itself to a contemporary, green, international image. Turkcell sponsors because an event with global GPS tracking, photo sharing and online following is a data and telecoms campaign packaged as "sport".

What these four names share: none of them sponsors for competitive results. They sponsor for brand exposure. And when ROI is measured in impressions rather than in finishing seconds, then failing to publish results is no longer an oversight. It is a design choice.

The public-institution layer. This is the layer that occupied my thoughts most. In many sporting cultures, the state stands back and lets the market operate. At Kaçkar, the state stands at the centre: the Ministry of Youth and Sports gives the start signal, DOKA pumps in regional development money, the Governor of Rize appears as local patron, and the national tourism agency folds the event into the country's promotional strategy.

In such a model, the event does not exist because it has competitive value. It exists because it has policy value. It is a tool for a remote, tea-growing, livestock-rearing region to gain a reason to appear on the international tourism map. The race is a means, not an end.

This is not wrong. I do not write to criticise a region using sport to trade for its livelihood. At sixty-three, after nearly half a century of watching sport, I have learned that sport has never been pure — it has always been a pretext for something else, and the best we can do is recognise the pretext honestly. But I do write to show that when the policy layer stands at the centre, the athlete layer is pushed to the margins.

The UTMB brand layer. Here there is a question no one at the start square asked: What is Turkey actually buying from UTMB? In a franchising model, the answer is something very concrete — international legitimacy. A mountain race in Rize, standing alone, would be just a mountain race in Rize. But under the name "by UTMB", it becomes a branch of an empire, and the empire grants it something hard to price: a reason for sixty countries to sign up.

In other words, the UTMB brand is a distribution channel. It is like a local coffee producer paying to sit on the shelf of a global supermarket chain. The product is still local; but the locality buys access to the market. And as in any franchise, most of the marginal profit sits on the brand owner's side, not with whoever makes the product.

The coordinator at Kaçkar was Johan Essl, race director, a figure from within the UTMB system. His presence is not merely a staffing detail. It signals that the event must comply with UTMB's technical, safety and branding standards — meaning the local organising committee had to upgrade its capacity to international level. This is a real benefit. But it is also a real investment, and that investment is borne locally.

The athlete layer. And this is the quietest layer of all.

Throughout my interviews and notes, I received not one name of an elite athlete. The only two names mentioned in connection with running the course were figures from a media organisation and a sports agency — participating in the twenty-kilometre distance. They ran to be present, not to compete. And that twenty-kilometre distance is the only distance information I obtained, suggesting the event runs multiple categories, though the full distance menu was not published.

I asked myself: if the goal is promotion, why not announce a winner? The answer, after much weighing, is that in a race with no world records, a winner only matters if that athlete is already known. Trail running has no ratified world record, as with track athletics. Each course is its own world, shaped by altitude, weather, terrain, equipment. Performance only means something relative to that very course, and often only within a single year. Which means: for a trail race to have sporting value, it must have one of two things — a course record, or an elite start list strong enough to make people believe running fast here is hard.

At Kaçkar, both are absent from the released record.

And here I recall an old story. In 2026, when my entire newsroom poured itself into the men's World Cup in Russia, I secretly watched the final of the women's U20 World Cup between Japan and Spain. I was obsessed with how the Japanese girls pressed high, covering 18.7 kilometres per match in total distance with nine ball recoveries in the opponent's final third. I submitted a piece, "The Hellish Press of Japan's U20 Women", to the men's World Cup section, and the editor dismissed it as "off-topic". Undeterred, I posted it on my personal page. Vietnam's women's national coach at the time, Mai Đức Chung, shared it and wrote: "This is what we need to learn." The piece hit one million views within seventy-two hours.

I retell that story here to make one point: I learned to use statistics as storytelling material, not to show off but to illuminate layers of meaning. With Kaçkar, I need the same kind of data — result sheets, course profiles, the names of finishers. And it is not there. A sporting event that does not publish results is not a sporting event failed by lazy journalism; it is a sporting event designed to avoid being measured.

Contrarian: "World-Class" Is a Slogan, Not a Fact

Here I will say plainly what many in the trade avoid.

When Minister Osman Aşkın Bak said that ultra marathon runners are world-class athletes with millions of followers worldwide, he said something rhetorically true and evidentially false. True, because at the very top of world trail running — the names at Chamonix, at Western States, at UTMB Mont-Blanc — there exist athletes followed live by tens of thousands via GPS tracking. False, because in the Kaçkar record there is not a single specific name from that tier.

This is a gap between claim and data. And that gap is precisely what is worth writing about.

Our sports industry has grown used to judging an event by its own promotional language. But when a race has two thousand people, sixty countries, and a national champion sponsor roster, yet still cannot produce a single line of results, then what we are looking at is not a strong sporting event. It is a media product dressed in sportswear.

There is one small detail I noted and consider more telling than any number. The minister said every trail here has cameras for taking and sharing photos. Think about it: the technological highlight the organisers chose to present was not safety tracking, not emergency rescue, not medical monitoring — but photo sharing. That says a great deal about the event's true purpose. Kaçkar's product value is measured in how many times content is posted to social media, not in how many seconds are shaved off a course.

In women's football, which I wrote about for years, I learned that if you look only at slogans, you will be misled. You must look at the payroll. You must look at sponsorship contracts. You must look at the athletes' electricity bills. At Kaçkar, that bill sits on the sponsors' side. What is bought here is the image of a place, and what is sold is presence. Both are legitimate. But only one of them belongs to sport.

I want to add one more story to make the notion of real value clearer. In July 2026, I was rejected over my piece on Japan's U20 women. I once thought that day of rejection was a scar. Looking back, the article rejected that year is the scar I cherish most, because it taught me that the real value of a sports piece lies in whether it has data to fight the laziness of the public. With Kaçkar, I have no such data. And that is exactly what I want readers to remember: the absence of data is, at times, the most important data of all.

From Saigon: Where We Stand in This Trade-Off

At Kaçkar there was a detail I carried back to Saigon in my head for the entire long flight.

The Governor of Rize recalled that last year, right at the start, fog and rain had hidden the Kaçkar range entirely. He told it with a smile, as the humour of a mountain man. But to me, it was a forgotten risk invoice. A mountain race in a Black Sea climate belt — where rain and fog are described as hiding an entire mountain range — carries high systemic risk: weather can wipe out an event's entire promotional value in a single morning. If beautiful imagery is the goal, then ruined imagery is the disaster. And the goal here is imagery.

That is a direct lesson for us, who are talking more and more about turning Vietnam into a destination for international sporting events.

I have witnessed both the power and the fragility of this model from the inside. In 2026, at fifty-eight, I was invited to commentate for a new TV channel during the Tokyo Olympics. While colleagues chased the athletics squad, I chose to sit through the women's football final between Canada and Sweden. Christine Sinclair, forty, scored at her fifth consecutive Olympics, but afterwards she cried, and the reason was not victory. She said the Canadian women's team received only one-eighth of the men's funding. I stayed two extra days in Tokyo, interviewing her through a window due to distancing rules. Together with a Canadian female reporter, we cross-checked the numbers and ran an investigation titled "The Diamond Who Was Never Paid". The piece pressured the Canadian Soccer Association into raising the women's budget by twenty-five percent.

I tell that story to say that a sporting event, however large, can answer one question if you ask it correctly: Who is profiting from someone else's sweat?

At Kaçkar, I asked that question. The answer emerged fairly clearly: national sponsors profit from exposure; the tourism agency profits from image; Rize profits from visitor flow; the UTMB system profits from franchise fees and control of the satellite chain; and the athletes — two thousand people who paid for flights, hotels, entry fees — receive a beautiful run on a beautiful course, plus a very small chance to collect a virtual pebble for the Chamonix lottery.

A young friend of mine in Hanoi, a striker who once video-called me during the distancing days of 2026, is Nguyễn Thị Thanh Nhã. She was nineteen then, wearing a shirt dusted with flour, cheerfully showing off a hundred loaves of bread she had baked to sell and fund her passion. She only made one video call, but it pulled me back from the abyss. I retell this because it gives me a measure. Real sport, to me, is when value is created at the point where a nineteen-year-old girl must bake a hundred loaves to afford to run. Sport as a promotional product is when value is created at the point where an airline sells extra tickets. The two can coexist, but must never be confused.

What I want to say to organisers now dreaming of a "UTMB Vietnam" is this. When you invite an international brand onto your soil, you do not buy sporting quality. You buy a distribution channel. That channel only has value if you retain ownership of your own story — meaning you publish results, you honour your athletes with numbers, you measure your course with records, and you let the local community be the protagonist rather than the backdrop for an international advertisement.

If an imported race cannot even name its winner, then it is not a race. It is a film shoot. People see a match; I see destinies passing the ball. People see a mountain race; I see two thousand pairs of shoes carrying a promotional invoice, and I want to know who signed it.

What I Keep After Leaving Ayder

The pitch taught me that some lessons are never rejected. The lesson from Kaçkar is one of them.

I left the Ayder Plateau in the afternoon, when the fog had lifted, and the Kaçkar range emerged deep green and so beautiful that one forgets the hard questions. That is the power of sporting beauty: it makes us stop interrogating. And that is also its danger.

The Kaçkar by UTMB event will continue. It is in the brand-building phase of a new race, and over the next few years it will need to prove its value through what it lacks today: specific people, specific marks, specific results. When organisers begin publishing results, it means they have begun to believe in sport, not only in advertising.

At sixty-three, I no longer have enough time to see a mountain race in Vietnam become an Asian Chamonix. But I have enough patience to wait for something smaller and more necessary: a race where the finisher is named. A race where people do not only say that sixty countries came, but also say how far those countries ran, in how long, and what they paid to be there.

Mountain sport, after all, is the only sport in which people cannot hide the gap between saying and doing. The mountain does not read press releases. The mountain only knows how to weigh each footstep. And perhaps that is why we need to take more races into the mountains — to remind ourselves that every promotional figure must, in the end, submit itself before a real stretch of dirt, a real pair of legs, and a real finisher.

If you are thinking of organising an international-branded mountain race in Vietnam in the coming years, ask yourself one question before signing the contract: Do you want sixty countries to remember your name, or do you want sixty countries to remember the names of those who ran on your soil?