Isabelle Poletti On the Business of UTMB Week

This quite excellent interview with Isabelle Poletti was conducted by L. Alberto Rodríguez for the Spanish sports magazine MARCA and published just last week. It’s worth reading in its entirety, even if the translation the browser created wasn’t generating the best English. I got the gist of it though, and with it a few fascinating pieces of information I wanted to share, just no quotes this time, sorry.

• Among the many employees and volunteers the organization utilizes for UTMB week a lot of effort is spent on managing not just the runners, but the overall flow of traffic, the focus on environmental protection and education, and other aspects that are mostly overlooked when thinking about a sporting event of this scale.
• The fan zones along the race course have gotten so much attention these last couple of years and are something UTMB is now actively trying to manage to ensure that runners, and fans, and the local communities around it can all enjoy into the future.
• There’s clear disappointment from UTMB’s side that the WMTRC was placed so close to the UTMB Finals on the annual racing calendar. And there seems to be an effort from UTMB’s side to try to avoid this sort of calendar conflict in the future.
• There have been some conversations between World Athletics, Golden Trail Series, and UTMB to create an overarching “World Championship of Trail Running”, but no details were given.
• This interview was published just a few days ago before the bombshell revelation that Joyline Chepngeno doped. Isabelle talks very smartly around the issue of doping in trail running and UTMB’s efforts in trying to keep the sport clean.
• And finally as a Spanish publication it’s no surprise that the question about Kilian Jornet possibly returning to UTMB is brought up. The parties have talked since the rather public blowup and from UTMB’s perspective there seems a definite chance that Kilian might return to Chamonix at some point in the future.

I find this article fascinating, the line of questioning feels entirely fresh and creates a bunch of interesting new insight – to me. There seems to be no media outlet in the US that asks these sort of questions in our sport. And as a result there’s something missing from our collective (English-speaking) conversation. And this is not just about American journalists interviewing spokespeople from UMTB, but whenever race directors or events managers are being interviewed here in the US, the conversation is almost entirely about nostalgia and history – the glory days of the sport, and its beautiful beginnings. But in this interview for example, we hear that UTMB and Golden Trail Series – two organizations with French roots – are in conversations with World Athletics about where to take the sport – which is massively fascinating. Yes, we do have podcasts with pundits talking about their ideas and dreams for our sport, but these folks are mostly talking heads with no skin in the game themselves – or with any ability to actually influence the sport directly through their actions. Don’t get me wrong, conversations with athletes about their performances are great, but this seems to dominate our airwaves. We, as in American trail media, could use someone digging a bit deeper like L. Alberto Rodríguez did here. Well, until we have someone doing this in English, with an American focus, I guess I will continue to use my browser translation tool to get the full picture of what is happening in our sport.

Thanks to Matt Walsh for surfacing article on his latest post on Trailmix.