Kaçkar by UTMB, second edition: two thousand runners, sixty countries, and what the results sheet has not yet said

Ayder, Rize. Fog spilling down off the Kaçkar range hung so low that only feet were visible. I stood to the left of the start line, where nobody looks, and did what I have done for thirty years: I counted. Two thousand pairs of shoes. Sixty nationalities on the bibs. Wet asphalt, mountain grass, and warm diesel from the supply convoy.

People ask what women know about tactics. I answer by counting an athlete's breathing from the grandstand, more accurately than a stopwatch. At Kaçkar there was one thing I could not count: the answer to the race.

Context: an institutional coalition and an empty results sheet

Kaçkar by UTMB entered its second edition as a stop on the UTMB World Series, operated by the Ultra-Trail du Mont-Blanc group based in Chamonix, France. The venue is the Ayder plateau in Rize province, in Turkey's Eastern Black Sea region. Johan Essl serves as Race Director, a sign that the central UTMB brand is directly involved rather than delegating the event entirely to a local organising committee.

The 20 km distance is confirmed by the fact that Minister of Youth and Sports Osman Aşkın Bak and other officials ran that course. This is the familiar UTMB architecture: a race that usually offers several distances in parallel, from short to ultra, serving newcomers and seasoned runners alike. The full distance menu has not been disclosed in the source.

Behind the course sits a broad institutional coalition: the Ministry of Youth and Sports, the Türkiye Tourism Promotion and Development Agency, the Rize Governorship, and the Eastern Black Sea Development Agency (DOKA). The sponsor tier includes Turkish Airlines, TOGG, Turkcell and Maxis. Having national champion brands on that list says something about the commercial scale of the event, well beyond a local trail race.

And here is what I noted first, stated plainly: the source names no winner, no finish time, no placing, no course record. Not a single line.

What is actually being measured at Kaçkar

Mountain running has no ratified world record. That is a structural feature of the discipline, not a shortcoming of one event. A runner covering 100 km over terrain with thousands of metres of accumulated climb cannot be placed next to someone running the same distance on flat ground. Performance in trail running is always course-relative. Its only quality measures are the course record and the depth of the elite field, and the source supplies neither.

Selection works differently from track and road too. Entry to the UTMB Mont-Blanc finals does not come from a time standard but from a lottery and from Running Stones accumulated at qualifying races. That network explains how a race in the Turkish mountains can draw two thousand people from sixty countries in only its second season: they come for the UTMB brand, for a ticket to Chamonix, and for the landscape. This event is not measured by the stopwatch but by airline seats and hotel nights.

I have tracked the operating structure of races like this for years, and the distribution chain is clear. Upstream sits the region's capacity plus the UTMB brand licence. Midstream sit the event and its national sponsors. Downstream sit image value and local tourism economics. A national carrier sits on the link between participants and the place, which is why Turkish Airlines is not an incidental sponsor.

Minister Bak stated the direction plainly when he compared the ambition for Ayder and Rize to Davos and economic forums, and noted that sports tourism delivers significant revenue to the country. That is a strategic statement about a place, not a statement about athletic performance. The right way to read it is inside the sequence of events Turkey is building toward hosting a continental multi-sport games in a few years' time.

Kaçkar's largest risk sits in the Black Sea climate, which hid the range in the first edition. The Rize Governor recalled that last year fog and rain swallowed the Kaçkar. For an event whose communications value depends on images broadcast from mountain terrain, weather is the most destructive variable, and alternative courses and cut-off times are worth verifying before trusting the event's promotional worth. The second variable is public money: DOKA, the ministry and the governorship are funding sources that can shift with budget cycles.

The contrarian angle

Specialists tend to file races like this under no performance data and close the drawer. I think that is a blind spot. An empty results sheet does not mean an empty course. In the changing room I learned that records are only markers, while history is what people do not say out loud. Every athlete who passes me is a universe. I am only the person behind the door, recording their pulse.

But analytical courtesy has limits too. When organisers assert that the field here consists of world-class athletes with followers around the globe, that is a manner of speaking. A manner of speaking without a start list attached is still only a manner of speaking. In 2026, in Busan, I sat in a press room and heard a coach say that women should stick to writing about emotion. I did not argue. I spent six months cutting video, counting every foot strike in the final three hundred metres, and the next time I produced a number that silenced him. For Kaçkar, that number does not yet exist.

One point deserves saying in fairness. Precisely because there is no time standard, trail running opens the door to the masses in a way track and road athletics cannot. Two thousand people on a plateau are two thousand stories about endurance, discipline, and people who never had a chance to stand on a major start line. Commercialising that model does not erase its value. It only changes the unit of measurement.

What to watch

Over the coming months I will wait for the start list and the full results, because once names and times are posted, the question of competitive quality answers itself without anyone arguing. I will also wait for the distance menu and per-course records, the only thing that enables genuine performance analysis in this discipline. And I will wait for a sponsorship renewal covering the third edition, a sign that private money is confident enough to travel alongside public money.

Sport is a common language, but every discipline has its own grammar. The stadium track speaks in seconds. The mountain trail speaks in the distance between people. What I am waiting for at Kaçkar next season is not a record but a results sheet pinned to a board. When it appears, we will know whether we are standing before a festival of a place or a race of human beings.