TrailCon, Bigger Than Chamonix

Today the team behind TrailCon, Dylan Bowman, Brendan Madigan, and Douglas Emslie announced their title sponsor for this year’s TrailCon, their industry trail running conference sandwiched between Broken Arrow and Western States. On Running will be using TrailCon as platform to launch a few new products and to get some face time with the American trail running world between Salomon’s Broken Arrow and Hoka’s Western States.

On the Freetrail podcast Dylan announces the partnership with On and few more tidbits about the upcoming event. Here are some quotes (grabbed via the transcription tool in the Apple Podcast app):

David Kilgore from ON:

We are absolutely like so jazzed first and foremost to be partnering with TrailCon and with you guys. Dude, I was there last year and just freaking blown away the whole time. Just the engagement, the type of people it curated, the engagement with athletes brands all across the board.

Doug Emslie, co-founder of TrailCon and entrepreneur in the exhibition industry having sold his prior company for a cool $1 Billion:

You know, for 10 days in Northern California to bring together the trail running community, you know, starting with Broken Arrow, then with TrailCon, and then finishing off with Western States. This will be the premier 10 days in trail running in the world and will be way ahead of what’s going on in Chamonix in August. This is going to be the place to be.

Brandon Madigan, owner of Alpenglow Sports and co-founder of Broken Arrow:

…we’ve made a plea to all of the industry to either come as an exhibitor at a very exciting vendor village that’s public facing, but also to get behind us because we are coming from a place of altruism and the desire to really support the sport that we all, you know, love and make a living in.

Dylan Bowman:

When people are there, we can take advantage of that proximity, bring the community and the industry together to forge positive some outcomes for the sport and in some way collaboratively build the future of this amazing sport together.

Here’s what I wrote when TrailCon was launched last year, which still very much feels spot on:

This couldn’t be placed at a better time and location. When Broken Arrow first launched it was clear that their ambitions were to connect their event, held just a week prior to Western States at the starting location of the race, Olympic Valley. Now, a few years later and Broken Arrow having grown into the US’s foremost, and probably largest trail race event (that’s not a 100miler!) it’s time to take this to the next level. Olympic Valley is no Chamonix, but that’s the trajectory here, clearly. Or as Doug Emslie, the co-founder who brings the conference organization experience to the table, said in the launch video on Freetrail: “the conference is meant to be the Davos for trail running”. Not sure if that is tone deaf or overly ambitious, but I don’t think Davos, aside from being a gathering in a mountain town, conjures up images of being representative of the larger community, or open to community ideas, or accessible to the community at all. Davos is anything but, it’s full of elitist billionaires planning the destruction of the planet. But, I give them that this was a reference to a gathering of importance in a mountain town.

Alright, so we’ve moved on from the comparison of Davos to Chamonix. A bit more relevant, fewer billionaires and politicians and more trail runners and mountain people, I guess. But what still puzzles me is the attempt to build community while competing and one-upping one another. I’m genuinely curious if the Polettis were ever on French media pumping their fist in the air proclaiming that they will outdo Auburn, or Silverton, or Leadville, or Olympic Valley for that matter.