Skyrunner World Series is Evolving for 2027

Andres Olivera Scollo, business development manager for the Skyrunner World Series on LinkedIn:

[The] Merrell Skyrunner® World Series has historically been the home of all-time champions the arena where athletes master the art of moving fast and light across technical, unforgiving terrain before many eventually transition into the ultra distances. Watching our U23 field battle across every ridgeline this year reinforced why nurturing this pipeline matters.

Looking ahead to 2027, we are evolving. We are preparing a youth series that is more dynamic, more inclusive, and more accessible, opening wider pathways for emerging runners worldwide to test themselves against the best.

Andres statement above pertains here to the U23 Series, which has run alongside the regular Skyrunner World Series for the past couple years. His statement brings up an interesting point though: looking at the “big series” in trail: UTMB, WTM, GTWS, SWS there are two concepts of how structure interest for athletes: UTMB focuses on qualifying ‘Stones’ throughout the year, which are just added lottery tickets for the Finals in Chamonix. Yes, elites can win direct entry if they do well and are placing in top 10 or 3 and have a high enough index, but overall it’s a pretty straightforward system that includes all runners. All other series have a complicated – to varying degrees – point system that ranks elites determining a winner at the Final.

Case in point: In this past weekend’s GTWS Final at the Muju Trail in South Korea, in the women’s race the winner of the race Andrea Kolbeinsdóttir, didn’t actually win the 2026 Series. Now, I fully understand that there’s a precedent for these systems, other sports do this too. But I don’t feel that this is well-covered in our media. Does anyone really follow this and regularly report on it? GTWS had a team competition this year. Does anyone know what happened with that?

World Trail Majors invites elites to run 100M races and provides points, but runners just can’t run enough of them in a year for the rankings to really play out in a competitive and exciting way.

Anyway, this seems hard. And I am not trying to make the case for everyone to just adopt the UTMB approach. But, they do a couple things right: their system invites all runners, not just elites, to participate and their system is straightforward that runners who line up in Chamonix for the Finals all have a chance to win, and if they do they are the overall winners. This is something the media has understood and knows how to cover. Any other system needs a lot more education and handholding by the Series promoters/owners to get buy-in from the public.

And worse, several of these systems actually go against the spirit of ‘trail culture‘ as they force spectating over participation.