Kaçkar by UTMB: How Turkey Is Buying a Seat on the World Trail Map With Running Stones and Public Money

I read the Anadolu Ajansı piece on Kaçkar by UTMB three times. The first time to grasp the event. The second time to look for results. The third time, I stopped at an odd gap: a race that gathered 2,000 athletes from 60 countries, with Minister of Youth and Sports Osman Aşkın Bak personally firing the starting signal, with UTMB Race Director Johan Essl standing beside him — but not a single winner's name, finishing time, or course record anywhere in the report.

For most sports readers, that gap is unremarkable. They read the piece to know that an international trail event took place in Turkey. For me, a journalist covering athletics for the Japanese market, the gap itself is the story. It tells me what narrative the event was designed to carry, and who that narrative is sold to.

Over nine years covering the sport, I've learned a rule: a sports news piece tells you who it is talking to by what it chooses to include and what it chooses to leave out. A report that speaks only of scale and never of performance is not a deficient report. It is an honest report about a different category of event — one whose primary product is not a result, but a destination image.

Kaçkar by UTMB belongs to that category. To understand it, we need to place it inside the wider ecosystem it belongs to.

Context: UTMB is no longer a race

UTMB — Ultra-Trail du Mont-Blanc — began as a single ultra-trail event around the Alps in Chamonix, France, in the early 2000s. Two decades later, it is no longer a race. It is a global franchising ecosystem.

The mechanics are elegantly simple. UTMB Group owns the brand and the Chamonix final. Local races around the world that want "by UTMB" after their name must meet central technical, safety, and branding standards. In exchange, they join the UTMB World Series — a network that distributes a reward currency called Running Stones.

Running Stones are not money. They cannot be exchanged. They cannot be traded on any secondary market. But accumulate enough of them and a runner can enter a lottery for a place at the Chamonix final. That mechanism turns hundreds of scattered trail races worldwide into a unified distribution chain. On the road marathon scene, races compete. On the trail, races feed each other.

Kaçkar by UTMB is a node in that network. It sits in eastern Turkey's Black Sea region, around the Ayder plateau in Rize province — high mountain terrain, wet climate, distinctive landscape. This is its second edition. It offers multiple distances, one of which is a 20 km course run by organisers. Johan Essl's direct presence as Race Director signals this is not a spontaneous local race but an official UTMB node.

The structurally decisive detail: the event is co-governed by a state coalition. Ministry of Youth and Sports. Türkiye Tourism Promotion and Development Agency. Rize Governorship. And DOKA — the Eastern Black Sea Development Agency. This is not a self-running private club model. This is public investment in local image, with the state behind it.

Understanding these two layers — global private brand and local public budget — is understanding the whole logic of Kaçkar by UTMB.

What the 60-country number actually measures

When a report stresses 2,000 athletes from 60 countries, readers tend to assume it is a marker of sporting strength. In trail running, that number measures logistics capacity and brand pull, not competitive quality.

Break it down. Sixty countries can mean 60 elite runners representing 60 developed trail nations, arriving for peak competition. It can also mean a tourism event: a French family on holiday, a Japanese runner combining a trip, a Chilean chasing a slot, a Kenyan trying the sport. No nation has two elite representatives. Two scenarios, same number, radically different sporting meaning.

For a second-edition race, the second scenario is far more likely. UTMB World Series distributes places via lottery and Running Stones, not time standards. Anyone with enough accumulated points can register. An amateur from Norway and a European champion can share a start pen, and the report counts both into the 60-country figure.

Trail running has no ratified world records. Any performance comparison must rely on course records and elite-field depth — neither of which this report provides.

The Running Stones machine

Running Stones is the smartest financial invention running sport has produced in a decade. In essence it is a loyalty point: finish a satellite race, earn a few virtual stones. Accumulate enough, and you enter the Chamonix lottery. Stones cannot be cashed. Stones cannot be resold. But stones create a reason for trail runners to keep coming back into the UTMB system, year after year, instead of trying independent races.

The result is a network effect. More races in the system means more runners must run inside the system to collect stones. More runners inside the system means more local races want to join to capture the traffic. UTMB Group does not need to own the courses in Turkey, Japan or Chile. It only needs to own the distribution mechanism for the final.

This is closer to Uber than to World Athletics. You don't own the car. You own the ride-hailing app. UTMB doesn't own the mountains. It owns the gateway. And that gateway is the single most valuable asset in today's global trail ecosystem.

Kaçkar by UTMB is one node in that network. Its value lies not in how many champions arrive to race, but in how many amateurs are willing to fly to Rize to collect a stone.

I have attended mass-participation events in Japan and Europe. In trail fields, the start line feels different. People don't compare watches. They compare packs, shoes, season mileages. The race is not confrontation; it is a rite of passage. Running Stones convert that rite into a commercial loop with no terminal point.

Where the public money flows

The presence of DOKA — the Eastern Black Sea Development Agency — is a detail the report drops without analysis. A regional development agency is a public finance vehicle. It does not fund a race because the race is good. It funds a race because the race is expected to generate regional economic impact: full hotels, busy restaurants, extra domestic air tickets, Rize's image on international media.

This is soft-infrastructure public investment, not hard infrastructure. No stadium is built. No track is paved. Money flows into event operations, media, logistics. In return, local government expects a new category of visitor — the "active tourist" — to arrive over the coming years.

Japan does this with local marathons. South Korea with long-distance walking events. New Zealand with Ironman. The common thread: sport is not used to make champions. Sport is used to sell a place.

In this logic, bad weather is a communications disaster, not because it ruins the race, but because it ruins the photograph. The Anadolu Ajansı piece says it plainly: images broadcast from here will be very beautiful. For an event whose product is imagery, cloud cover is a commercial failure.

The sponsor coalition is not random

Reading Kaçkar by UTMB's sponsor list, I see a very Turkish coalition. Turkish Airlines — the flag carrier, the tool that brings international visitors. TOGG — the young EV brand, Turkey's first domestic car manufacturer. Turkcell — the largest telecom operator. Maxis — another commercial partner.

The list is not random. It is a national brand coalition positioning itself in the story of "modern, integrated, green Turkey." An airline needs an international destination image. A young EV brand needs an association with nature and clean energy. A telecom needs an association with community and connection.

European football has done this for decades through shirt sponsors. Trail running is doing the same, but at smaller scale and far lower cost. You don't need to buy Champions League rights to have a race that carries your brand. You sign a three-year sponsorship with a local event in a beautiful destination. Per dollar invested, this may be the most efficient image investment in modern sport.

That is why a second-edition race in a remote mountain region can pull four major national brands behind it.

The "world-class athletes" gap

Minister Osman Aşkın Bak says ultra marathon runners are world-class athletes with followers worldwide. That is true in the abstract. In the context of Kaçkar by UTMB, it is promotional language, not a verifiable claim.

I track several major trail races. At UTMB Mont-Blanc or Western States, organisers publish elite start lists months before gun time. Media write previews on individual matchups — Kilian Jornet versus Jim Walmsley, Courtney Dauwalter versus her own limits. Post-race reports break down every climb, every drop, every surge at km 120.

At Kaçkar by UTMB's second edition, none of that exists. No elite list. No preview. No post-race analysis. Only the totals: 2,000 athletes, 60 countries.

For a mass-participation, tourism-focused event, that is not wrong. But it turns any claim of the race's world-class standard into an empty claim.

No data to check against. No names to verify. This is a blind spot common in sports media: we assign sporting weight to events that are essentially tourism events.

A comparison with Japan — and a note from Osaka

I live in Osaka. The contrast between how Japan and Turkey treat trail running caught my attention.

Japan has a very strong distance-running culture, but its identity is tied to asphalt — ekiden, marathons, university races. Trail exists but is not central. When UTMB expanded into Japan, it had to ride on Mount Fuji's image and the credibility of established local races.

Turkey does the opposite. The country has no publicly recognised trail tradition. No significant university circuit. No broad semi-pro runner base. But it has mountains, plateaus, a rising tourism culture, and a state willing to use sport as an image-diplomacy tool.

That is why UTMB chose Turkey. Not because the country has strong trail runners. Because it has terrain, tourism infrastructure, and political backing.

When Japan hosts an international sports event, the first press question is whether Japanese athletes can win medals. When Turkey hosts Kaçkar by UTMB, the first question is not medals. It is how many international visitors will come. Both approaches are legitimate. They simply produce two different definitions of success. And the second definition is winning in global sport.

The real risk is weather, not athletes

The detail that caught me most in the report was not 2,000 or 60. It was the Rize Governor recalling that in the first edition, Kaçkar was hidden by fog and rain.

That is a small but heavy confession. For an event whose core value is natural imagery and scenic experience, fog is a systemic risk. You can control athlete numbers, sponsor numbers, course quality. You cannot control clouds.

Kaçkar is a Black Sea mountain range, in a year-round damp climate. Fog here is not an anomaly; it is a feature. Ultra-trail events in comparable regions — Scotland, Norway, parts of Chile — must build contingency: alternate courses, strict cut-offs, sometimes the right to cancel entirely for safety.

The Anadolu Ajansı report does not mention these plans. It mentions that trails have cameras for photos and sharing. That is a safety and promotional feature, not a fog-mitigation measure. For a second-edition race, the absence of extreme-weather experience is the top operational risk — far above the competitive-quality risk, which cannot be assessed from the report alone.

Weather risk is not just race risk. It is investment risk. If edition three is hit by heavy rain and the race is shortened or cancelled, the image Rize wants to build over years can take damage. For the state, fog is not just weather. It is budget. That raises a question: can a publicly funded event stay patient through multiple risky seasons before achieving the image returns it wants.

The contrarian view

A common belief in sports policy circles holds that hosting an international event automatically nurtures a new generation of athletes. I do not believe it. I have never seen a country produce champions simply because an international event arrived on its soil.

Look at recent cases. Japan hosted Rugby World Cup 2026 — how many more world-class rugby champions did the country produce. Turkey hosted a EuroLeague Final Four — how many Turkish basketball players reached European elite thanks to that event. There is almost no clear case.

International events do not produce athletes. They nurture facilities, local imagery, sometimes a fan culture. Producing athletes is the work of schools, grassroots coaches, and a ten-year youth-race system. Public opinion dislikes the contrarian view, but history feeds it with time.

If Kaçkar by UTMB truly wants to become Turkey's trail centre, it needs to work at a different layer — investing in grassroots coaches, building a youth race system, creating year-round usable courses rather than a once-a-season event. That work is less glamorous than hosting four thousand international visitors in a week, and slower to monetise. But it is the real work.

Hosting is the easy job. Building a foundation is the hard job. Most countries choose the easy one first. If Turkey chooses otherwise, I will be the first to write a piece celebrating it. But I will wait for evidence, not for a press release.

What to think about

Kaçkar by UTMB will continue. A third edition, a fourth, maybe a tenth. But to answer whether it becomes a genuine trail event or merely a successful tourism campaign, I need something edition two did not supply: elite start lists, per-distance results, and a finishing time comparable to other events in the same system.

For a sports analyst, that is data. The rest is imagery. Imagery is beautiful, but it cannot balance the equation. And in the coming decade, as more countries use sport to sell places rather than to develop people, the question I put to Kaçkar will need to be put to many other events too: are we building sport, or are we selling scenery.