What Stays After This Year’s UTMB?

It seems that the trail media is back on board, and so are the main voices and talking heads of our sport. After several years of calling for boycotts and complaints about various decisions UTMB made, this year felt like a sea change. There were no asterisks, no snarky side tones, no whiney blog posts, podcasts, or lengthy Instagram posts complaining about cheese and other cultural misunderstandings¹. And those few and far between seemed to have been grasping for straws and fishing for clout. The athletes are all back in town, and so are the influencers². The brands never left and doubled down this year. And if there’s one thing people had to quibbled with it’s the over saturation of brand presences in the valley. Everyone wants to outdo the other and hopes for a bit of the shine of the valley rubbing off on them. But as it comes to UTMB the storylines are all largely positive. Folks expressed their excitement to have spend some time in the shadows of Mont Blanc. No one mentioned Ironman all week long. Everyone of name wanted to be there, or kept it to themselves if their brand forced them anyways – maybe the paychecks increased?

UTMB has won

Yes, there is that story about the mayor of Chamonix, but this is about local politics and doesn’t affect our sport. Well, maybe the outcome of it will, but I am confident that the team around Catherine and Michel Poletti are confident that they are able to come to an amicable solution for all parties – they live in town after all and want to show their face at the local boulangerie on the weekends. This is also an issue one can resolve sitting around a table and not one being discussed on social media – which is a huge bonus.

Michel won too

And to show just how confident UTMB is in their position, Michel Poletti ran the full UTMB loop around Mont Blanc again, in his 70s, and finishing it in 1,578th place, winning is age group in 44:58:26. (This was his tenth attempt and after DNF’ing in 2023 and 2025 he finished it again – congrats!) What a way to say: this is our race and this is our home. We’re real trail runners and we’re here to stay.

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1 Maybe it helped that American runners stood on a lot of podiums. This gave the mostly American media lots to cheer for and not look for answers excuses on why their runners didn’t do better – was it the Sodastream cola?

2 Several of the influencers and media writers were trying to sounds more level-headed in their brand sponsored write-ups about their UTMB visit by parroting the mayor’s concern about overcrowding in the valley – but they themselves were there for the brands, and the activations, and the parties – and not the actual races. So they themselves are in the perfect position to fix their own problem.