ON Running Bails on UTMR Contract

From the Ultra Tour Monte Rosa Facebook page:

How do you feel when a sponsor retracts their support part way through a 3-year agreement? We now know that feeling well, thanks to #onrunning. On we won’t miss you. Good luck forging a sustainable market in the running world that excludes mountain or trail. You’ve missed a big trick here. We don’t believe in you and neither do our runners.

Bizarre development here. That contract could not have been that much money for ON, which is part owned by Roger Federer and clearly is spending a ton of cash right now to position themselves as a fashionable shoe brand.

Maybe UTMR didn’t grow the way ON were hoping/expecting? When I ran UTMR it felt like a little mountain race, not even remotely comparable to UTMB one valley over and one weekend earlier in the calendar.

Ian Corless comments on the post:

On make trail shoes. They do not last, do not work and the clouds fill with debris – terrible.

I didn’t love the pair of their trail shoes I was testing. The little cloud bubbles endlessly squeaked when only slightly wet and even though the shoes sell the idea of “running on a cloud” were’t bouncy or soft at all. Rock hard shoes.