Laz Does Not Know How to Save UTMB

I really wasn’t going to write about Brian Metzler’s article in Trailrunner about Gary Cantrell “Laz” visiting Chamonix during UTMB week. But, after Trailrunner promoted the article on Instagram with the tagline “Gary “Lazarus Lake” Cantrell Came to UTMB. He May Know How to Save It.” I thought, hey, I am rage baited, let’s go.

Here it goes

• Laz. How many films do we need? What new nugget of new information can there be shown? Yes, he’s an attractive figure to cover. But man, are there no others that would deserve a biopic?
• Laz and the Barkley phenomenon is a huge deal in France. In fact I would wager most books/films about Laz/Barkley are driven by French media publishers and interest. They love Barkley as much as Brice from Satisfy loves cowboy culture.
• I’m sure Laz didn’t ask for a meeting with the mayor of Chamonix, the article for that matter. He’s just a pawn in this self promotion game by everyone around him.
• Trailrunner posted 36 articles about UTMB in past four weeks (and counting). They are firing on all cylinders over there. I bet this is the only international running event that receive that much attention from Outside.
• Brian Metzler wrote the article and published it on Trailrunner. Not on Trailhead Media by UltraSignup where he’s currently the Director of Media and Content. Brian was the founding editor of Trailrunner magazine and was let go/left during Outside CEO’s Robin Thurston’s wonderful pivot to software as a who-knows-what. Brian hasn’t published an article there since November 2024. I am told this is a one off. And it somewhat makes sense for it to go there. UltraSignup News isn’t the right fit for UTMB content – USU doesn’t get registration fees from their races after all.
• Back to the article. In it, Laz doesn’t actually claim that he knows how to Save UTMB in Chamonix. The article largely follow Laz for a day as he wanders around Chamonix, meets with people is gracious and grumpy, he’s Laz.
• And finally to the tagline: Could you imagine the collective conniption by the America trail media if someone wrote a headline that said “Catherine Poletti knows how to save Western States and/or Hardrock”? Or even better: “UTMB has ideas how to fix American trail culture.” And don’t get me wrong here, I am not laying this at the feet of Laz or Brian. My guess is that this tagline is someone’s doing in the editorial team looking for clicks.

American media reaps the benefits of publishing in English. Therefore, by default and not because they’ve earned it, they are reaching a much larger audience than just their regional language silo. That’s something folks in Europe struggle with as their trail media often stays regional due to the language barrier. I don’t know what Trailrunner’s ambition is. By covering an international event I would wager though that they are interested in reaching an audience that’s more than just their regional/national readers. But these sort of headlines/taglines – and the attitude behind it – is exactly why the rest of the world shakes their head at Americans and how they present themselves to them. Especially in times like these – hello Lake Ontario! – a bit of respect and courtesy would go a long way.

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Bonus:

In today’s UTMB article (Updated my number of how many UTMB related articles Trailrunner posted!) titled “How to Recover From UTMB (Even if You Didn’t Race)” we get the following sentence:

Are you experiencing less content of Ben Dhiman’s dominance, Lauren Gregory’s grit, or Blandine L’Hirondel’s bawling?

Why do we give the American winners positive nouns “dominance” and “grit” while the French winner of UTMB is just “bawling”?

This is so embarrassing.