Gary Responds

Read the whole thing, it’s worth every word. The story is just as bad as one would have thought. Vail fucked up badly but this is the part that’s most crucial new piece in the puzzle:

In 2021 during the pandemic we were contacted via the IM-UTMB group about potentially acquiring our Squamish50 races. I said we were not interested and we moved on. One year later, in 2022 they reached out a second time. By this point I knew two race directors who I respected that’d decided to sell to them. I also heard through a verified source that two more highly respected race directors in the US were also in conversations with them about a potential acquisition. Geoff & I have been doing this now for 11 years now, and the first 5 were a major struggle to make ends meet. Given the unique opportunity on the table we decided, after an incredible amount of dialogue between us and our families, that we might as well hear them out. We signed an NDA and had a single zoom meeting with them. I was completely torn about this and cannot say with any certainty what we would have done had we been tabled an offer. Above all else we would never compromise what we’d built by allowing a major entity to not honour our values. On the single zoom meeting we had with this group I came forth by saying there were “many non-negotiables” on my end, meaning our community support programs, our volunteer appreciation programs, etc. The response was simply that that’d be a conversation for another time. The last we’d heard from them was in late June saying they were putting a pause on this for the short term.

Good luck with that strategy UTMB/Ironman. You will fail, or as a well-known and very well-positioned race director said to me at the US Trail Running Conference this past weekend: “I’ll give them five years and this UTMB World Series will fail.”