Kaçkar by UTMB, Second Edition: 2,000 Runners Into the Fog and Türkiye's Sports-Tourism Bet

Kaçkar by UTMB, Second Edition: 2,000 Runners Into the Fog and Türkiye's Sports-Tourism Bet

By the time Türkiye's Minister of Youth and Sports, Osman Aşkın Bak, fired the starting signal, the Ayder plateau had already disappeared into a fog so thick that the direction signs were nothing but pale smears. Thousands of people stood folded into windbreakers, headlamps burning like a low band of stars, trekking poles rising like a forest. When the signal came, the crowd did not explode forward the way a 100-metre gunshot implies. They merged into a slow current, inched uphill, and vanished into the white.

I watched the clip three times. On the third pass I understood what kept pulling me back: the sound. There was no roar of a grandstand. There was the click of poles on stone, breathing, wet fabric rubbing against wet fabric, and someone behind shouting a Turkish phrase I could not translate but whose tone was unmistakably reassurance to whoever was ahead.

That was the moment I realised I was watching a sporting event through a different lens than usual. No scoreboard. No extra time. Nobody scoring in the 88th minute. Only a start line, a mountain, and two thousand people consenting to a race whose greatest prize, for the overwhelming majority of them, is simply to finish.

I write from Da Nang, Vietnam, where I still wake at four in the morning to watch European esports finals, and where I spent seven years editing for Runner's World. Those two worlds — the blue light of a screen and the grey light of dawn on a running path — have always sat at opposite ends of the sporting experience. Kaçkar by UTMB is one of the few events that makes them overlap.

A stage inside an ecosystem called UTMB

UTMB stands for Ultra-Trail du Mont-Blanc, a mountain race born in 2026 around the French town of Chamonix, at the foot of the Mont-Blanc massif. From a single race it grew into a brand operating a satellite circuit called the UTMB World Series, spread across continents. Kaçkar by UTMB is one stop on that circuit, set in the Kaçkar mountains of Rize province in Türkiye's Eastern Black Sea region, centred on the Ayder plateau.

According to Anadolu Ajansı, this is the event's second edition, drawing roughly 2,000 athletes from 60 countries. The race director is Johan Essl, a UTMB-side official. Minister Osman Aşkın Bak fired the start himself. Among the participants were two agency journalists, Yusuf Özhan and Hasan Hüseyin Kul, running the 20-kilometre course.

One thing must be said at the outset: this is a ceremonial, promotional report filed from an event stage. It confirms the existence of a field but contains no result whatsoever. No winner. No finish times. No splits. No course records. That is the starting point for everything below — and the limit that forces many of my questions to remain open.

Kaçkar is a range whose summits exceed 3,900 metres, with glacial valleys, high lakes and spruce forests following stone streams. The Ayder plateau sits around 1,300 metres above sea level, and the courses climb far higher. For a Vietnamese amateur runner, for whom the familiar mountain routes are Sa Pa or Tam Dao, that altitude is not unthinkable — but it is different in logistics. Altitude, fog, rain and long climbs with no aid station are four variables no clear-sky day can erase.

What stands out is that the organisers did not choose a major city. They chose a small plateau town with limited accommodation, a single access road, and weather that can reverse within half an hour. That is a deliberate choice, and it reveals the entire strategy behind the event.

The real race happens at the level of architecture, not speed

When I follow an esports event, I usually ask what the system is actually selling the viewer. A tournament can sell skill, it can sell narrative, it can sell the right to participate. Kaçkar by UTMB is selling three things at once, and the one in the middle is the one worth analysing.

The first is a ticket. The UTMB World Series runs on "Running Stones" — virtual stones awarded for finishing satellite races, used as weights in the lottery for the Chamonix finals. The race in Rize is a door. Not a door to a medal, but a door to another door. The mechanism uses no time standard. There is no 2:10 marathon equivalent you must clear. You finish, you accumulate, you hope.

Technically, this is a clever design: it turns every satellite race into a loyalty station rather than a knockout stage. Sociologically, it is a mechanism for building community through collective ritual — much the way a video game retains players through a chain of daily quests rather than a single final.

The second is local image. At the start, Minister Bak offered a telling comparison: Türkiye wants Ayder and Rize associated with international organisations, the way Davos is associated with economic forums. That is the most strategically loaded sentence in the whole report. Davos is a small Swiss Alpine town that became a proper noun for global power simply by hosting an event. The minister is not betting that Rize will produce a world champion. He is betting that Rize will be named in the same sentence as important things.

The third is money. The minister states plainly that sports tourism brings significant earnings. The sponsorship structure confirms seriousness: Turkish Airlines, the EV maker TOGG, the telecom group Turkcell, and Maxis — a coalition of "national champion" brands whose presence is not aimed at 2,000 runners but at marking the host nation's frontage. Behind them stand the Ministry of Youth and Sports, the Türkiye Tourism Promotion and Development Agency, the Rize governorship, and DOKA, the Eastern Black Sea Development Agency. A regional development agency's involvement means public money, allocated as regional investment rather than elite-sport spending.

A UTMB World Series stage in Rize is not a sporting event with sporting objectives. It is a piece of soft infrastructure, designed to test and upgrade a region's organisational capacity, paid for with international imagery over a few days. That reading explains a great deal: why a minister rather than a federation president; why a governor speaks about fog rather than performance; and why the report is entirely silent on who won.

The rhythm of a race nobody runs to win

In esports I have seen the same paradox. Major tournaments run open qualifiers that thousands of amateur teams enter. A handful harbour real ambition. The rest compete for other reasons: to be present, to mark a season, to see their name on a bracket. To outsiders it looks wasteful. To insiders it is the entire point.

Trail running works on exactly this logic. Of two thousand starters at Ayder, the share capable of contesting the podium is tiny. The rest run for three concrete reasons: a personal milestone, lottery weight for the finals, and a few days inside a community.

This is why comparing a UTMB World Series stage to a national championship is a category error. A national championship selects the best. A satellite stage creates an annual ritual in which the best are merely part of the atmosphere. Those goals do not exclude each other, but they require different evaluation criteria. Judged as a championship, Rize looks thin. Judged as a commercially framed community ritual, it is performing very well.

One technical detail deserves emphasis: the two Anadolu Ajansı journalists ran the 20-kilometre course. A 20 km race is not an ultra. Ultra-trail by definition means distances beyond the 42.195 km marathon, usually with significant cumulative climb. The existence of a 20 km option shows Kaçkar operates a multi-distance menu — common across UTMB World Series stops, opening the door to newcomers and veterans alike. The consequence is that the event cannot be judged by a single number. There is no single "winning time" at Kaçkar, only winning times per distance. And because the report publishes none, the possibility of performance analysis here is zero. I state that openly rather than infer.

What can be analysed is geography, and it is substantial. The Eastern Black Sea climate is humid year-round, with some of Türkiye's highest rainfall. Fog at Ayder is not an anomaly but a permanent feature. The Rize governorship recalled that in the first edition, fog and rain hid Kaçkar. That is a polite reminder; operationally, it is an alarm. For an event whose promotional value depends on imagery, weather can erase the entire communications budget. When fog hides the summit, what is broadcast is not the Kaçkar landscape but a white screen. In esports terms, that is a stream losing signal mid-teamfight: the match continues, the audience sees nothing, and commercial value evaporates.

The bridge I see from this side

I came to running before I came to esports, and to esports before I studied sociology. The three layers stacked in an odd order, and they make me read Kaçkar differently from a straight news consumer.

In 2026, as a first-year student in Da Nang, I spent an entire summer watching the VCS on an old laptop. In game four of the final between GIGABYTE Marines and Young Generation, Levi stole Baron at minute 28 with a Smite, and I wrote a 2,000-word analysis. It was shared 300 times — a small number, but enough for me to understand I was not just watching; I was storytelling.

In 2026 I followed Croatia at the Russia World Cup and wrote about Luka Modric, the small man who had been a shepherd boy in wartime, lifting the Golden Ball. I compared his journey to a mid-laner carrying an entire game alone. A reader replied: do not mix real sport with games. I doubted myself for a week.

In 2026, when the VCS was suspended indefinitely by the pandemic, I wrote a series about players still training twelve hours a day in twenty-square-metre rented rooms. One of them posted that his mother had called, and he did not dare tell her he was unemployed. I cried writing that piece, and stayed in touch with him for two years.

Those three memories explain why, reading a report about a race in Rize, what caught me was not the number 2,000 but the story of a place trying to buy itself a name. From the virtual grandstand, I hear my heart beating in time with the match — and at Ayder the rhythm is slower, steadier, but no weaker.

Set beside Vietnam, the gap is interesting. Vietnam already has well-known trail races such as the Vietnam Mountain Marathon in Sa Pa, drawing thousands of international runners a year. Sa Pa has terrain, climate, community and story. What it lacks is a seat inside a global brand system of the UTMB World Series kind — the thing that turns a good race into a door to Chamonix. That is where Rize's lesson becomes valuable to Vietnamese readers. An event does not need to produce world champions to go global. It can choose to become one node in someone else's network. That route is less glamorous and far shorter. It is also the route Vietnamese esports already walked: we were once a region inside someone else's system, learning to operate to someone else's standard, before owning anything of our own.

The other side of a beautiful poster

Here I must check myself, because my instinct is to beautify. When I see two thousand people walking into fog, my reflex is to write something moving about perseverance. My duty as a reporter is to place that emotion beside a verifiable detail and let the two collide.

They collide here: the report calls ultra runners world-class athletes with global followings. As a general statement, true. In the specific context of Kaçkar by UTMB, it is rhetorical. No elite athlete is named. Nobody is introduced with a personal record, attached to a course record or described as a contender. Among those two thousand there are certainly strong runners. "Certainly" is not "demonstrated".

A well-organised event and a high-performance sporting system are two different things, and conflating them is the most common trap in state sports communication anywhere in the world. Türkiye organises an international stage well. That does not mean Türkiye has a trail generation capable of contesting the front of Chamonix. Both statements can be true; neither follows from the other.

The second risk is funding. When an event depends on a ministry, a regional development agency, a governorship and national brands, it depends on political and budgetary cycles. One shift in budget priority and the event can lose its anchor. That is the structural weakness of state-led sports tourism: it ignites fast and can extinguish fast.

The third is weather, already discussed — but with an extra layer. Weather risk is not only operational; it is narrative. An event that lives on imagery gambles with the sky every year. If the third edition is fogged in again, the story Rize wants to tell will be retold in the language of bad luck, and that language works against brand building.

The fourth, and deepest, is the illusion of achievement. When a country measures sporting success by the number of international events it hosts, it tends to stop measuring by the number of athletes good enough to matter. Those are two different budget lines. Hosting is infrastructure investment. Athlete development is human investment: slower, dearer, and far less photogenic.

I am not saying Türkiye is making that error. The source does not contain enough data to conclude it, and I will not infer beyond the source. I am saying it is the trap any country on the sports-tourism road must look at directly — Vietnam included.

One more self-correction. I built my identity around the word "outsider" — someone entering a large world he was not trained to belong to. It is a good writing position, because it licenses naive questions insiders are afraid to ask. But at some point the outsider has to become someone who has walked through the door, or the naivety becomes a safe habit. Writing about Kaçkar, I am no longer asking what this sport is. I know UTMB runs on brand logic, that Running Stones are a currency, that a satellite stage is not designed to identify the best. Knowing raises the responsibility, and requires writing differently.

Tactics are what people see; the soul is what we must feel. But felt with discipline — not felt instead of data.

The question I keep after the start line

There is one moment in the report I reread. The Rize governor recalled that in the first year, fog and rain hid Kaçkar, and that this year they hope for better weather and beautiful broadcast images. That sentence is not technical at all. Yet it contains the event's whole truth: a gamble against nature, staked with public money, in exchange for a poster.

For a runner, Kaçkar is a course. For Rize, Kaçkar is a brand. For UTMB, Kaçkar is a ticket outlet. For the national airline, Kaçkar is a route. For a viewer like me, Kaçkar is a question.

The question: should a country bet on hosting a global event, or on producing people good enough to lead it? There is no single answer. Each road has its own price and its own timeline. The venue road is paid in money, returns in imagery, and can break even in a few years. The human road is paid in decades and may never come due.

Where the lights do not reach, dreams are training. At Ayder the lights do not reach because of the fog. And inside that fog, two thousand people set off anyway. Independent of any communications plan, that remains the most beautiful thing I saw this week.

The stadium is empty, but the echo of passion never runs dry. Perhaps that is why I watched a clip of a start line I never attended, on a mountain I have never set foot on, in a sport I know I could never finish.