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The racing season is picking up steam, and I have a hard time staying on top of it all. Several big events are happening all over the world this weekend alone. Here are last week’s Mount Yun by UTMB results, some numbers and observations. (For full results visit the UTMB website):

UMY 100M (144KM – 4 STONES)

Women:

  1. Wenfei XIE – China – 23:03:50
  2. Ronghua DENG – China – 23:44:24
  3. XIAOXIA YANG – China – 24:08:22

Men:

  1. Jiaju ZHAO – China – 17:05:57
  2. Jiqian WANG – China – 17:39:28
  3. Weiqiang ZHANG – China – 19:15:32

DMY 100K (97KM – 3 STONES)

Women:

  1. Anna LI – China – 11:53:08
  2. Wenrong ZHENG – China – 12:03:02
  3. Liping WANG – China – 12:12:46

Men:

  1. Ji DUO – China – 09:36:05
  2. ZHAO Hu – China – 09:47:07
  3. Jiasheng SHEN – China – 09:59:37

MMY 50K (48KM – 2 STONES)

Women:

  1. Fuzhao XIANG – China – 04:53:01
  2. Ting ZHANG – China – 05:01:27
  3. Na ZHANG – China – 05:09:16

Men:

  1. Tao LUO -China – 04:03:39
  2. Guangfu MENG – China – 04:09:34
  3. Erqing WU – CNChina- 04:14:38

EMY 20K (21KM – 1 STONE)

Women:

  1. Qinghua LE – China – 02:38:53
  2. Sheyonghua SHE – China – 02:52:28
  3. Jun LI – China – 03:22:08

Men:

  1. Chaohai QI – China – 02:03:38
  2. WANG Guolong – China – 02:07:19
  3. Tiago VIEIRA – Portugal – 02:09:21

This was almost an entire clean sweep by Chinese runners, in a race in China of course. Special shout out to Tiago Vieira from Portugal who claimed a third place finish in the 20K race.

Combined, the events had 3,683 racers and 3,485 finishers, and another low DNF rate. Below are the numbers broken down by distance and gender :

  • 100M Starters: 393 – DNF 86 – Finishers 307. Women: 65 (21%) – Men: 242 (79%)
  • 100K Starters: 668 – DNF: 72 – Finishers: 596. Women: 149 (25%) – Men: 447 (75%)
  • 50K Starters: 1,337 – DNF: 21 – Finishers: 1,316. Women: 409 (31%) – Men: 907 (69%)
  • 20K Starters: 1,285 – DNF: 19 – Finishers: 1,266. Women: 490 (39%) – Men: 776 (61%)

In total the event saw 3,485 finishers, 1,113 (32%) women and 2,372 (68%) men reached the finish line and earned themselves stones and an UTMB index (or directly punched their ticket to the Finals in Chamonix for 2025).

When I think about this event I come to the sober realization that I really know very little about our world. Yes, the Olympics have been in China before and when it comes to truly global sports, of course they play soccer there, but I had no idea that trail running is as popular and when it comes to gender participation even quite diverse. Yes, it’s hard to travel there and so we see a very “regional event” with almost only Chinese runners (in the 100Miler, of the 307 finishers there were 294 from China). So maybe this World Series that UTMB is building is really about offering regional events for local runners to get their chance to earn their Stones for the Finals. Kinda like exactly how it has been advertised.

Next up on the UTMB World Series Calendar, and going live in just a few hours from April 26 -27 is UTMB’s Americas Major, the Canyons Endurance Runs in Auburn, CA.

MADE BY EINMALEINS