Salty is Salty, Again

It was inevitable, wasn’t it? The UTMB Group announces a new addition to the World Series in the German-speaking region and Salty Magazine is on the case with the latest temperature check of the German trail scene.

Some highlights from what Stefan Götschl penned on the official Salty social media account:

How the fuck did we get here? How does an announcement that presumably involved months of negotiations, expensive PowerPoint presentations and several people congratulating each other end with hundreds of runners wondering what the hell just happened to their race?

Hello, sir, this is a Wendy’s, you new here? It’s the fucking internet. Troll have been in the comment sections ruining every ounce of goodness for years, decades almost.

So why are people angry?

Salty asks.

One suggestion: I don’t think it helped that many of the European trail publications were quite misinformed about what happened in Whistler and when Zugspitz joined UMTB they all just parroted “more of the same”. Maybe you partially created this monster in the public perception?

People complained, yet distances sold out anyway.

Maybe that because there are way more people who don’t bother jumping onto Instagram to leave complaints in the comment sections? I talk to them, offline. They don’t bother wading into this trollish culture war.

A sold-out race tells you nothing about the people who never registered.

Same principle applies for complaining on the internet. You get it.

What we don’t understand is celebrating a free bus across the valley without seriously addressing the bigger question of how people travelled to the valley in the first place.

Did Salty post anything about international travel and carbon footprints when Innsbruck joined the World Trail Majors? In fact, that this even make the news in the German speaking trail scene? Why not?

And perhaps that’s the answer to our original question. People aren’t necessarily angry because another race has joined UTMB. We suspect many aren’t reacting to what Stubai might become. They’re reacting to what previous announcements have taught them to expect.

Recent announcements, or recent trail media commentary about said announcements?

Something has gone seriously wrong when the first thing people feel after hearing good news is the need to check what they’ve just lost.

I’d agree with this. But has UTMB seriously earned the title of villains the “counter culture” trail media are trying to bestow upon them? The Alps – and Europe in general – have a plethora of incredible trail running events. Big events, with thousands of runners, often several of them in the same valley every year. If UTMB owns a couple of them it ain’t that bad, the trail running scene will live.

For most parts independent trail races in Europe have been historically quite cheap – compared to their U.S. counterparts. UTMB seems to now be taking US pricing and applying it to all their events. I get it, this stinks and I’d be pissed too. But shouldn’t this just create a huge opportunity for independent trail races to undercut the evil corporate competition and offer the same standards and racing experience at a much lesser cost? Make the greedy corporate chain look dumb by underselling and overdelivering. This is a huge opportunity. What you don’t want is the Amazon effect, where UTMB comes in with a giant land grab and uses their corporate power to undercut the competition forcing them out of business. Making corporate, vanilla, “sell out” events expensive UTMB is creating a huge opportunity for innovation – take it.