Kaçkar by UTMB and the sports-tourism equation: When the state holds the microphone, who holds the stopwatch?

Twenty thousand pairs of trail shoes stepped onto the damp stone of the Ayder Plateau on Saturday morning. Twenty thousand numbers from sixty countries lined up behind the start tape, and a Turkish minister pressed the button. There is no ratified world record in this sport. There is no athlete named. There is no stopwatch measuring any victory beyond one thing: a country brand being marathon-run.

That is the moment I – a Vietnamese journalist living in Nairobi, specializing in East African athletics – realized that in the world of long-distance and ultramarathon athletics, the real winner is not the athlete crossing the line first. The winner is whichever country can turn fog into a brand.

This article is not a race report. It is a tactical archaeological dig on a competition that much of the athletics world still calls "a hobby for mountain people," but which is actually one of the most sophisticated sport-tourism models I have ever seen. And inside that model, women – as always – are being pushed to the edge of the positioning map.

CONTEXT: WHEN TRAIL RUNNING HAS NO OFFICIAL HISTORY

Mention athletics and Vietnamese audiences think Usain Bolt, Eliud Kipchoge, Sydney McLaughlin. Mention marathon and they think of Kelvin Kiptum's 2:01:09, or Tigst Assefa's 2:14:04 on the Chicago course. But mention ultra-trail – the athletics that happens at 1,300–2,000 meters altitude through Eastern Black Sea fog forests – most people do not know where it sits on the sport map.

Ultra-trail running has no world records ratified by World Athletics. There is no national team qualification standard. There is no official world ranking system. Instead, it has something else: a franchise brand system from UTMB Group – a commercial empire based in Chamonix, France, that operates the "UTMB World Series," a circuit of satellite races feeding the Mont-Blanc final.

Kaçkar by UTMB, in its second edition, is one of those doors. Two thousand athletes from sixty countries. Race Director Johan Essl, one of UTMB's central operators. And most importantly: not a single professional athlete is named in the opening news release. Minister Osman Aşkın Bak said "ultra marathon runners are world-class athletes with followers worldwide." That is promotional rhetoric. Quantitative evidence? The original article provides none.

This is the point I want to keep: trail running is a sport with thousands of participants, a global commercial system, sixty countries at a satellite event – but the mainstream athletics establishment still treats it as if it were a weekend hobby. I have watched enough World Athletics Championships to know: if a marathoner runs 2:09 in Berlin, she gets a sponsorship deal, an Olympic quota, three hundred lines of journalism. If a female athlete finishes 100 miles in the fog of Kaçkar, she might get one tweet from the organizers.

CORE ANALYSIS: THE STRUCTURE OF KAÇKAR AND WHAT IT HIDES

To understand why this competition matters for women's sport – or why it sidelines women – we must dig into its structure first.

Structure 1: Sports franchise in the McDonald's model.

UTMB Group does not organize races – UTMB Group licenses the brand. Kaçkar by UTMB is a "node" in a global network, where the local organizing committee meets UTMB's technical standards (mandatory kit, cut-offs, route safety, GPS tracking), and in return gets the right to use the UTMB name, plus connection to the "Running Stones" system – a reward points system that serves as a lottery weight for entry into the Mont-Blanc final.

This is not a federation model. This is a sports brand franchising model. A Turkish state official understood that when he said: "We want Ayder and Rize to be associated with such organizations, similar to how Davos is associated with economic forums." This is not talk about sport. This is talk about geographic positioning through sport.

Structure 2: State-Corporate sponsorship.

Look at the sponsor ecosystem: Turkish Airlines, TOGG (the national electric car brand), Turkcell (telecom), Maxis. These are not local sponsors. These are national champion brands buying one specific thing: country image via the trail course. When a Turkish Airlines spokesperson puts a name on the jerseys of 2,000 athletes from 60 countries, that brand is being run around the world.

On the state side, there is the Ministry of Youth and Sports, TGA (Turkish Tourism Promotion Agency), the Rize Governorship, and DOKA – the Eastern Black Sea Development Agency. This is a public-private hybrid financial model: DOKA regional budget funds local infrastructure upgrades, TGA funds international image push, and corporate sponsors fund attaching their brands to the scenery.

But there is one detail often overlooked: when public budget is the event's economic anchor, the event depends on the political cycle. Change the minister, change the governor, change the budget priorities – and the race can disappear. That is a structural risk most sports media never mention, because they are busy counting countries.

Structure 3: The absence of competition data – and why it is the story.

I want to pause here, because this is the most important point. The Kaçkar by UTMB opening bulletin provides no competition data whatsoever. No winner's name. No finish time. No distance breakdown. No previous course record. No ranking table.

Only two figures from Anadolu Agency and AASK are named as having run the 20 km course – that is a participation fact, not competition data. The Minister says "world-class athletes" but cites no one.

Why does this matter? Because it shows: in the sports ecosystem, there are races that exist to create image, not to create achievement. And when image matters more than achievement, women – the ones usually measured by achievement – are the first group pushed to the margin.

THE MIRROR CHECK: WOMEN'S TRAIL RUNNING – THE INVISIBLE TACTICIANS

I once wrote a 40-page report titled "The Invisible Tacticians" after collecting amateur phone footage from 12 women's clubs in Kenya, Tanzania, and Uganda during the 2026 global sports shutdown. I found that 9 out of 11 East African female goalkeepers hand-wrote tactical notebooks during quarantine – a behavior I had never seen from male goalkeepers in the same study. The lesson: when resources are scarce, female athletes create their own defensive systems. But no one writes them down.

Women's trail running sits in exactly that position. There are female athletes from Ethiopia, Kenya, Tanzania running 80–160 km on East African highlands every season, usually outside international competition because they lack the brand to accumulate Running Stones, the sponsorship to fly to Chamonix, and the journalists to dissect their tactics.

When I say "Turkey is building the Kaçkar brand," my mirror-check reflex immediately asks: who is building the brand for East African women's trail running? The answer: almost no one.

If a Kenyan female athlete runs 100 km at 2,000 meters altitude on the Mau Escarpment plateau, she has no slot at UTMB Mont-Blanc, no international press coverage, no national sponsor to fund the flight. She has one number: her finish time. And that number sits in her notebook, on cardboard, handwritten.

The Kaçkar model could be an opportunity, if used correctly.

If Turkey genuinely wants to turn Kaçkar into an East–West trail destination hub, they could use their own system to open doors for East African female athletes – women who have the genetic geography (born at altitude, used to gradients), but lack the social capital to compete in the commercial system. That would be a sport–diplomacy decision. But that is not the stated objective.

The stated objective is place-branding: turning Rize/Ayder into the Davos of trail. And when the objective is geographic positioning, athletes are the means, not the subjects.

CONTRARIAN: COMMERCIAL VALUE vs COMPETITION VALUE

Here I pose a contrarian question I know will spark debate: can a competition in which no athlete is named in the opening bulletin really be called a competition?

The system-level answer: yes. Because Kaçkar by UTMB is a country-brand tool, not an athletics contest. It exists to generate tourism revenue, to create media imagery, to position Turkish Airlines, TOGG, Turkcell on the international sports map. In that role, it is performing well. 2,000 athletes from 60 countries, two consecutive editions, Johan Essl's presence, ministerial backing – all are healthy commercial signals.

But the athletics-level answer: no. An athletics contest needs finish times, needs course records, needs named athletes. When those three are missing, we cannot compare it to Berlin Marathon or Chicago Marathon. We can only compare it to a sport-tourism festival.

This is the tactical blind spot of mainstream sports media: they accept "60 countries" as proof of success, without asking how many of those 60 countries sent professional athletes, how many sent women, how many came for titles versus for the destination.

I am not denying Kaçkar's commercial value. I am opposing the industry's habit of calling it "world-class competition" when it has not been verified by any competition data.

STRUCTURAL RISKS NO ONE WANTS TO TALK ABOUT

There are four major risks in the Kaçkar model that the bulletin does not address:

1. Weather risk (high). The Rize Governor already admitted the first edition was obscured by fog and rain. The Eastern Black Sea climate is notoriously harsh with sudden fog and rain. A trail race cancelled by weather destroys all image value. The Minister said "the broadcast images from here will be very beautiful" – that is a weather-conditional statement.

2. Public budget dependence risk (medium-high). DOKA, the Sports Ministry, the Rize Governorship – all are state or regional budgets. When government priorities shift, the race can lose funding. This is a financially unsustainable model without long-term corporate sponsors stepping in.

3. Promotion vs reality gap risk (medium). The claim "world-class athletes with global followings" has no evidence. When viewers start demanding data – finish times, distance menu, results – and don't see it, brand value erodes.

4. Gender risk (high). This is the risk I see most clearly and least discussed. A race that does not publish female athletes' names, does not publish gender distribution, does not publish gender-disaggregated viewership, has no feedback mechanism to position women correctly in the system. The country-brand model absorbs the entire picture, and that picture is usually painted in young, white, social-media-promoted male strokes.

TAKEAWAY: A QUESTION FOR GLOBAL WOMEN'S SPORTS

I write this from Nairobi, where I follow East African athletics every day. I write it not to attack Kaçkar by UTMB. I write it because the Kaçkar model is a template many other countries will imitate in the coming decade – and if we do not ask about competition value, about women, about athletes of color, from the second edition onward, then by the twentieth edition we will have a massive sport-tourism industry with no female athlete anyone's name can be remembered.

The first channel is always the hardest, but someone has to hold the microphone. When races stop – or when races run but no one is willing to count – I see the invisible tacticians start to speak.

The question I want to pose to Vietnam's sports media – and to ourselves in Kenya, in Turkey, anywhere trail running is being written into a national brand: are you telling the story of 60 countries, or are you telling the story of athletes erased from the map?

Because in the Kaçkar place-branding picture, I see 2,000 pairs of running shoes. I do not see a single East African woman among them named. And that, based on my experience following athletics, is the largest gap of the season.