A Look At the Skyrunner World Series Standings Ahead of This Weekend’s Finale

Eighteen races are completed, including the return of the Skyrunner World Series to the United States at Beast of Big Creek earlier this Summer – the 12th race in the Series. And now, it all comes down to this: this weekend the Skyrunner World Series will crown its 2026 Champion at the SkyMasters Final: Marato dels Dements in Spain. Here’s a look at the current standings, and a link to the full standings:

Women:

PLACE	NAME	COUNTRY	POINTS
1	Sara Alonso	Spain	500
2	Amanda Nilsson	Sweden	431
3	S. Nurmukhametova	Neutral Athlete	428
4	Natalie Beadle	Great Britain	405
5	Eva Delafosse	France	382
6	Patricia Pineda	Spain	380
7	Rosalia Zegarra	Peru	349
8	Kalie McCrystal*	Canada	329
9	Eve Pannone	Great Britain	326
10	Alice Bausseron	France	323

* Kalie McCrystal passed away in August during a climb on the Matterhorn in Switzerland. The SWS team decided to keep her name in the standings in her honor.

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Men:

PLACE	NAME	COUNTRY	POINTS
1	Jose Manuel Quispe	Peru	478
2	Frederic Tranchand	France	463
3	Manuel Merillas	Spain	447
4	Alex Oberbacher	Italy	377
5	Marcos Villamuera	Spain	377
6	Nicolas Molina	Spain	375
7	Morgan Elliott	USA	360
8	Daniel Antonioli	Italy	353
9	Weston Hill	New Zealand	326
10	Lucien Mermillon	France	306

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Just as I was finishing this up the Skyrunner World Series published a full article explaining it all.

How athletes got to this place:

Athletes qualified for the Final by completing at least four MSWS races with a top-20 finish, or automatically through a top-3 finish at a nominated Skyrunner® National Series race, in a National Series final ranking, or at a Skyrunning Continental or World Championship.

The SkyMasters pays 200 points for first, 170 for second, 153 for third and 138 for fourth. A tie goes to whoever finishes higher at the Final, and a DNF ends any title bid.

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Scenarios for the Win:

Men

• Quispe is champion if he finishes ahead of Tranchand and Merillas.
• Tranchand (15 points back) takes the title by finishing ahead of Quispe in the top three, as long as Merillas doesn’t overtake him.
• Merillas (31 back) needs to win with Quispe third or lower, or finish second with Quispe fourth or lower, while staying ahead of Tranchand.

Women

• Alonso is champion with a top-four finish, whatever her rivals do.
• Nilsson (69 back) needs to win with Alonso fifth or lower, or finish second with Alonso seventh or lower.
• Nurmukhametova (72 back) needs to win with Alonso fifth or lower, or finish second with Alonso eighth or lower, and beat Nilsson.

The article also has a breakdown of how the prize money is being distributed.

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A few observations:

• A good number of nationalities are present in the top. But still only predominantly Europeans (14 of 20).
• With four of the eighteen races in the circuit being in Asia it’s quite surprising that no Asian runner made it into the top 10.
• Two South American runners made it into the top ten (four races where in that region).
• Six athletes earned themselves valuable points at Beast of Big Creek this year. The only race in North America.
• The U.S.’s sole hope rests on Morgan Elliot, winner of this year’s Beast of Big Creek.

Lastly, I am excited that this series exists, for obvious reasons, and its existence and structure provides a healthy and welcoming antidote to the blue Godzilla from Chamonix. But! Why is the structure and calculation so complicated? Is anyone actually following all this and making sense of it all?

So, there’s a winner of the Series. They are determined by the number of races they ran and the points they accumulated – and the top three already received some prize money for standing on top of the Series. Then based on the number of races you completed and the points you accumulated in the series you’re invited to run in the Finals. Which you can win prize money at, and win. But you can also win the final race and not the Series due to the number of points you have, or not have.

Then there are the National Series qualifiers added on top of it.

So, an athlete could win either, or all, or some of:

• the Series,
• the Skymaster Finals
• The race itself.

Am I getting this all right?