Stubai Ultra Trail Joins UTMB World Series

After a few quiet weeks the UTMB Group’s announcements and developments are churning again. This time with the announcement of another event joining the series in a popular tourist destination in the Alps: the Stubai Ultra Trail in the Stubai Alps, Tyrol, Austria.

Event dates will be on the first weekend of July and five race distances on offer are from 100K to 20K.

Neustift was one of the locations of the WMTRC races in 2025 and hosted the Trail Running Film Festival too. Interestingly too that Innsbruck, the host (and sister city) of WMTRC just went the other way with their big trail running event joining the World Trail Majors.

Rumblings on German-speaking social media suggest that UTMB isn’t done expanding yet in that region for this year and another announcement might be coming soon.

Interestingly too, and worth pointing out that the press email that was sent out by UTMB announcing this, didn’t have quotes from the local race director but from the local tourism associations. I believe what UTMB has fully figured out here, and is now executing on on a large scale is exactly this: they’ve packaged the “trail race as weekend event” product and are selling it to tourism destinations looking to fill beds. This works on tourist islands, in Tennessee, and of course in popular destinations in the Alps where associations are tasked to offset dwindling tourism dollars due to melting glaciers and missing snowfalls in the winter with all-season activities. UTMB brings the brand, the runners, and the full execution to host an event attracting thousands and puts the valley and towns on the global map. And trail running races are an annual event, not just something tourist regions apply for once, pay through the nose and then the event moves on, like what happens with many other sporting events. If you’re living in and off a tourist region, and you’ve been accustomed to applying for and hosting mountain bike world cups, skiing competitions and other mountain sporting events, why wouldn’t you want to host a UTMB event. An event that isn’t just for the elites of the sport and their support staff and spectators, but for everyday runners in the thousands.

I’ve been in that valley and would definitely run that race – especially with Lavaredo, mozart100, and Zugspitz selling out so fast.