Matt Ponders Chamonix’s Turning Point

Matt Trappe is speculating on UTMB’s options for the future:

The zeitgeist around UTMB this year feels different. The races themselves are of course as competitive as ever. Great but not newsworthy IMO. Chamonix and the surrounding area, however, have finally swollen to the looming breaking point and we appear to have a breach.

Woof on the bolded section I highlighted here. That seems like a big thing to just glance over?

Could the various races move to different weeks or months? Do PTL, MCC, TDS, YCC, OCC, ETC , CCC and UTMB all need to occur the same week?

Yes, there are no other events in the valley throughout the year, no other trail races, and spreading them out would totally increase newsworthiness of them? Also, why would UTMB give up its most brilliant achievement: the harmonically layered the starts and finishes of their various races to play so beautifully in town?

Matt continues:

Even further, could the UTMB HQ rotate cities?

Also a wild idea I don’t even have a comment for.

The big issue for me with Matt’s thinking here is that the basic notion is that “UTMB is too big” – therefore UTMB needs to fix it’s events and reduce its races” and not what Matt himself follows up his post with and why he’s actually traveling to town:

UTMB has a LOT of brand events. “Activations” if you will. Too many? Depends who you ask. But the public appetite for these experiences is high and that itself is the take away. Long films, Substack articles and IRL experiences are winning and they’re a lot of fun. UTMB is so crowded but what a great problem to have.

Yes folks love to travel to Chamonix to attach their brand activation to UTMB, but at this point if UTMB would reduce itself in size ACG would just come on and offer more influencers catwalk VK performances. So, no I don’t think reducing the UTMB field size is going to solve anything other than give the “ambushing” brands a way to increase their marketing offerings.