The Trojan Horse in Chamonix

Why don’t I start this one off with an Odyssey reference, after all this movie had been the talk of the town throughout the summer , but I digress. I’m not here to talk about movies, but if I would, I would talk about the Trail Running Film Festival streaming the 2027 tour reel all October long online. Tickets will be available starting Oct. 1. Oh, I did digress, I wasn’t going to talk about movies, and neither was I talking about the last two year’s men’s winners of the UTMB Finals, Tom Evans and Ben Dhiaman, both ASICS athletes.

This proverbial Trojan horse I am talking about here is ‘njuko’. Who, what?

njuko is a online events registration platform. The company is based out of France, but since 2022 owned by ASICS – the Japanese shoe and sportswear company. And further, ASICS owns several other registration platforms, among them Race Roster and GetMeRegistered. Why does ASICS own event registration platforms? And what’s the value her for a shoe company? The data, I would presume. Athlete information, runner data, event insights – all available, globally through registration platforms.

Now, back to njuko. As you might have guessed, they are a white-label event registration platform that is powering every (probably) UTMB World Series race registration globally. Yes, ASICS the shoe company and competitor to HOKA, title sponsor of the UTMB World Series is behind the company that’s controlling every transaction for every race registration for the UTMB World Series. That’s a lot of data.

Make what you will with this information but this is fascinating and will deserve a lot more digging and ruminating.

PS: Thanks to a friendly tipster for pointing me into this direction.